At the August 2010 government summit about planning a national antibullying strategy, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that every year, 8.2 million kids are bullied at school. He also said that in 2007, more than 900,000 kids in secondary schools reported they’d been cyberbullied (bullied online).
In 1995, the National Education Association estimated that every day, 160,000 kids stay home from school because they’re afraid they’ll be bullied. And at 2010’s summit, Duncan said, “A school where children don’t feel safe is a school where children struggle to learn. It’s a school where kids drop out, tune out, and get depressed.”
Kids still stay home from school—or give up on school entirely—because they’re afraid of being bullied.
TAKE THREE:
I am grown up. At a political meeting in my hometown, I mention that bullying often occurs on our school buses. “Oh,” says one man, “but all kids are bullied—I was bullied.” He sounds like the many people who think bullying is a natural part of childhood—a normal rite of passage.
In 2008, the Yale School of Medicine found that there seems to be a definite connection between being bullied and committing suicide. Would the grieving parents of Phoebe Prince and Carl Joseph Walker-Hoove, both from Massachusetts; Eric Mohat from Ohio; Megan Meier from Missouri; and Ryan Halligan from Vermont—all suicide victims because of being bullied—agree that being bullied is a normal rite of passage?
More videos race through my head.
TAKE FOUR:
I’m a student teacher, and in the class to which I’m assigned there’s a girl who is obviously a lesbian and who I’m sure has been bullied. One day I hear that she’s been raped in the girls’ bathroom with a Coke bottle by some of her classmates.
Studies have shown that more than 33 percent of gay, lesbian, and transgender kids are harassed physically in school because of their sexual orientation, and more than 25 percent are harassed because of their gender expression. A study done recently at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens are bullied two to three times more than straight ones.
TAKE FIVE:
I can see this video clearly, because the boy it’s about is someone my partner and I helped bring up. Let’s call him Kevin. Kevin’s slight of build, has a pleasant, friendly face and a neat sense of humor, and his light brown hair tends to drape over his forehead. He’s the closest thing to a son I’ve ever had.
Now picture a sprawling one-story high school building with a flat roof. Put Kevin on top of it with other boys around him—and watch as the other boys hang him by his heels from the roof.
Thank God he neither fell nor later, like Phoebe Prince, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, and many others, committed suicide.
But years later, after Columbine, Kevin told me and my partner that had it not been for music, basketball, and people like us to talk with, he might well have taken a gun to school and used it, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High.
In 2002, research done by the Secret Service and the US Department of Education found that 75 percent of the school shooters they studied were victims of bullying.
There are thousands of bullying incidents every day.
Bullies and bystanders are caught in a cruel vortex of aggression and fear.
