Nine-year old apparently commits suicide at school

Another change is the lengths the bullying goes to. Damn. When I was in school, it was waiting for a kid after school and maybe push him around a little. A few snide remarks. The occasional wedgie.

Today, I read and hear stories of outright vandalism, threats you'd expect from hardened criminals, staged beatdowns for the benefit of YouTube and other truly frightening shit.

Makes the 1980's bully seem almost quaint.

 

I went to a rich, suburban high school where the biggest scandal in four years was a kid who brought a knife to school. He wasn't threatening anyone, he just found one of his dad's hunting knives and brought it to school. He was expelled.

The same school, basically 20 years later, has several weapon incidents a year.

20 years ago you could get in a fight and go home with a black eye. You never worried about someone coming back with a gun to get revenge.

It sucks. I feel like I have to be a lot stricter with my kids than my parents were with me and that really sucks.

 

My parents were the two chaperones on our sixth-grade field trip to the state capitol (every Minnesota kid has taken this field trip). On the bus back, the biggest bully in school and his henchmen - they really were like the lackeys who used to aid the Riddler and Joker on the old Batman show - started harassing this girl who got picked on quite a bit. They were doing it verbally and also knocking her in the head. All of a sudden, my dad, a mild-mannered, quiet, don't-rock-the-boat guy, reaches over, grabs Dave by the shoulder, yanks him back, sits him in his seat and loudly says, "That's enough. You do not move from that seat the rest of this ride and not another word." What? What? Mom meanwhile went and comforted Linda, the picked on girl. The teachers came back and thanked them and chewed Dave the bully out.

Me? I was mortified. What are you doing, dad? Jesus. You don't mess with Dave! Now, of course, I'm proud of what they did, and even then, later that night I started thinking it was cool that my parents stopped the wrong they were watching. Felt like when Charles Ingalls would stand up to bullies on Little House. Word got around that dave was going to beat me up as retribution for what my parents did but I wasn't afraid of the kid and nothing came from it. He remained an asshole throughout school. And he did have a shitty home life himself, but it didn't excuse the way he was. He eventually committed suicide. But at least for that day, his bullying ways stopped.

 

Another reminder of what can happen if bullies aren't stopped:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/8473978.stm

 

Problem is, there are many 4th graders who were not as lucky as you and end up getting their ass kicked by the 6th grader.

Then the 6th grader and his friends see that they can continually bully the 4th grader and the kid can't do anything physically to stop him.

The 4th grader's self-esteem goes down the tubes because he feels powerless. He feels worthless and thinks that suicide is a way to escape. Or, he figures that if he gets the gun, the fight is now equal.

 

I am sickened by this.

I have a 9 year old boy, and couldn't even fathom this.

 

I think we should be careful assuming that every time a kid who is bullied ends up shooting up a school or committing suicide, it was because of the bullying.

"He was bullied, therefore he did it" is a temptingly easy attempt to make sense of such a senseless tragedy, but the reality is sometimes a lot more complex (although I grant that sometimes it really is that simple, too).

 

A couple years ago, I was walking my dog and saw a group of some of the jerky kids in the neighborhood messing with a kid I knew. He was on a bike but was trying to run with it to get away from them.

I asked what was going on and he said they were after him for something or other. So I walked behind those kids as they followed the one kid home.

My kids were horrified that I would get involved with these supposedly tough guys.

Whenever I see a group of them hanging around looking guilty, I walk right to them. They usually skulk away.

 

To piggyback a bit on Rick's post, this is a societal issue, not a bullying issue. Bullying has always been around and always will be. I certainly don't have the answers as to why children react to bullying in ways they never would have in previous generations. But the fact they do, and sometimes in tragic and horrifying ways, shows me there's a lot more at work here.

 

I'm not actually convinced this is happening more or differently than in the past. Again, 24-hour national news makes us see things we wouldn't have otherwise seen.

 

True. The Columbine book from last year pretty much took apart the idea that Klebold and Harris shot up the school because they were the victims of bullying.

 

Perhaps, but I think we live in a society today where the responses to everything seem to be heightened and overly dramatic. I was bullied when I was a kid. Almost everyone I knew was at some point. We all dealt with it in different ways, but all the ways seemed to be part of growing up — fight back and win, fight back and lose, do your best to avoid it, take it and move on, etc. The bullying sucked when it happened, but it was usually forgotten amid all the other things we did during childhood.