Bullying
Kansas Teen Awarded $250K In Bullying Lawsuit
Now, there are many people on the net complaining about this kid, what a wuss he must be, how dare this pansy cost the school district 250K, why didn’t he just hit one of them/kick them in the balls/make funs of them back, he probably is gay, etc.
I wish I had thought of it myself.
My I first arrived in CA at age 14, I was Ally Sheedy from the Breakfast Club. Same posture, same feral unpredictability, same withdrawal punctuated by the same attempts to express myself communicated only uncontrollable outbursts, all of it. Only instead of lasting an hour and half, I was on 24/7.
I was a textbook case of abuse. What kind of abuse?
Bullying. Since kindergarten. Don’t ask me why it started. I couldn’t tell you. All I can say is that one day the little kids on the playground started picking on me and I cried. That was pretty much all it took. Maybe if you grew up in a big town, with big high schools, not only did the pace of life provide endless alternative amusements for your peers so that childhood mishaps passed quickly through short attentions spans, but at one time or another you all got to experience complete anonymity.
Or maybe you didn’t.
You have no idea what I would have given to experience complete anonymity at age 10, because in small town America everyone knows you from birth, your role in the social order is defined and set very fast, like concrete. I was the designated The Kid To Be Picked On. Dad yell at you over breakfast? Just throw the little red haired girl down the embankment and feel like a big strong guy. Mom and Dad have a fight last night and you’re scared and confused? Just make sure you and your pals find the little red haired girl and make fun of her clothes, her glasses, the way she walks and talks. Or better try to convince the school populaiton that she has sex with her dog by yelling it loudy everyhwre you see her. Make sure to keep it up all day. Not doing well in school, teacher embarrassed you by calling out on front of the class? Steal her bookbag on the bus home and toss that 13 years old girl’s tampons around the bus.
And before you scoff and say, there was no such person at my school. Think about it, because when the 40 kids from my elementary school first met up in the high school auditorium with the kids from 3 other small schools met at High School orientation at the end of 8th grade, I could pick them out. They were so visible, like they were black lit. Every school had at least one: shoulders hunched in permanent wariness of attack, trying to blend into walls as their tiny forms, no matter tall they may have been, reflected the shriveled sprit within.
Whether you saw them or not, your school had them too.
Some people may think “bullying” is simply a couple kids calling the scrawny runt in school names in the hall between classes. The football players giving the occasional wedgie to Freddie Munz. It’s not. It’s a constant barrage of insults, shame and embarrassment and physical attacks. It’s theft, vandalism, manipulation & toying with their emotions, it’s verbal/mental abuse, physical abuse, anything and everything to degrade this particular child. To make their life a living hell in order for the rest of the community to feel superior.
We would toss adults in jail for doing such things. Why do we tolerate it in children? Isn’t that kind of a mixed message we send? "Hey it’s o.k. to beat up and degrade kids that are different from you when you are a child, but after you turn 18, funs over...or, you’d just better get more subtle and sneaky about it."? When we emphasize teaching tolerance to our children, are we also teaching them the tolerance of the other individuals that live next door, their P.O.V. and way of life? How can you expect the adult to be tolerant of other ethnicities when you haven’t even taught the child to be tolerant of the kids they attend school with everyday who have different interests and opinions?
Victims of bully suffer many the same emotional problems as those who have suffered abuse that the hands of a caregiver: severe depression, long term anxiety, crippling lack of self esteem, inability to make friends and trust people and more. It has even been suggested that this constant state of stress physically subverts the brain's normal development in children, making such emotional conditions physical ones and ergo that much harder to overcome. So if your child comes and tells you that their life at school is horrible and they would do anything to avoid it, do not simply sit there and tell them in some vague fashion that it will all get better when they grow up. They’re growing up right now.
And here’s one for parent who’s children bully. While you sit there mentally patting your son or daughter on the back for being the “B.M/W.O.C.” or complain to everyone how "no one understands" your child: 6 out of 10 children identified as bullies in school are convicted of a crime by the time they reach 24. Still think your kid is cool?
And many ask “Why don’t these kids simply attack back?” Why doesn’t a victim of spousal abuse leave her husband? It’s not just isolated incidents, this is an entire structure that children create and live within. It’s like Lord of the Flies, only it lasts a child’s lifetime. It’s “the way it is” and the child, their spirit utterly beaten down, believes that they are powerless to change it. And when you have years of social order and entire township (or four) of peers to work against, he or she may not be able to. At least not alone.
Unless they are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold or Jeff Weise.
Many people afterward talking about how mentally disturbed they were, about how they were part of the “Trench Coat Mafia” which was like a gang (it wasn’t, it was just a label, like “stoners”, which in my High School in CA we called “BL-ers” for “Behind the Library”, or “jocks”), but did one student come forward and apologize for their part in creating these two outcasts? It takes at least two to throw someone out of a society; The individual and the group and the blame for conflict that can result from that dehumanization belongs to both sides. When I entered the 8th grade, I had shot up in height to around 5’8” and during that year discovered that if I stood up, there was this uncertainly that came into their eyes. If I answered a challenge to fight, they backed down. And if I lunged at them, they would run like hell. Basically, after years of trying with all my soul to fit in, be nice, play by their rules and wondering what was wrong with me, I started to become violent and acting out. So that when I watched that terrible massacre at Columbine or read about the appalling tragedies at Red Lake reservation, I was horrified at what was happening, utterly appalled at this mass murder…but there was a small piece if me that understood it. Not the moral vacuum in these children’s minds that allowed for cold blooded, meticulously premeditated murder, but the rage and helplessness those frightening calculations sprang out of.
(Though Wiese seems to have many more flat-out mental and emotional problems stemming from his family history, as well as the hopelessness of living on one of the poorest reservations in the U.S., than the Columbine killers, yet still, how many had reached out to this kid who so obviously was headed down the wrong path?)
If my family had not moved to California, my parents were prepared to put me into a private school. Not that that would have worked because one of the bully’s was also going to the same school, so I was very lucky to wind up out here, but I know in my soul that had I remained in the school system of my hometown, I would have ended up one of three ways: dead from suicide, in a mental institution or in jail for assault and battery.
Given what has happened in the recent past, is shameful that any school administrator would fail to take any case of bullying seriously. This school administration in Kansas had five years to address the problem and they treated it as many of the internet population did: “What the big deal? What a whiner that kid is.”, just as my school administration probably thought “What the big deal? What a whiner that little girl is.”, just as the Columbine’s administrators probably thought “What the big deal? What whiners those kids are.”
$250,000 seems a small price to pay in lieu of another 10 or 13 children dead.
Now, there are many people on the net complaining about this kid, what a wuss he must be, how dare this pansy cost the school district 250K, why didn’t he just hit one of them/kick them in the balls/make funs of them back, he probably is gay, etc.
I wish I had thought of it myself.
My I first arrived in CA at age 14, I was Ally Sheedy from the Breakfast Club. Same posture, same feral unpredictability, same withdrawal punctuated by the same attempts to express myself communicated only uncontrollable outbursts, all of it. Only instead of lasting an hour and half, I was on 24/7.
I was a textbook case of abuse. What kind of abuse?
Bullying. Since kindergarten. Don’t ask me why it started. I couldn’t tell you. All I can say is that one day the little kids on the playground started picking on me and I cried. That was pretty much all it took. Maybe if you grew up in a big town, with big high schools, not only did the pace of life provide endless alternative amusements for your peers so that childhood mishaps passed quickly through short attentions spans, but at one time or another you all got to experience complete anonymity.
Or maybe you didn’t.
You have no idea what I would have given to experience complete anonymity at age 10, because in small town America everyone knows you from birth, your role in the social order is defined and set very fast, like concrete. I was the designated The Kid To Be Picked On. Dad yell at you over breakfast? Just throw the little red haired girl down the embankment and feel like a big strong guy. Mom and Dad have a fight last night and you’re scared and confused? Just make sure you and your pals find the little red haired girl and make fun of her clothes, her glasses, the way she walks and talks. Or better try to convince the school populaiton that she has sex with her dog by yelling it loudy everyhwre you see her. Make sure to keep it up all day. Not doing well in school, teacher embarrassed you by calling out on front of the class? Steal her bookbag on the bus home and toss that 13 years old girl’s tampons around the bus.
And before you scoff and say, there was no such person at my school. Think about it, because when the 40 kids from my elementary school first met up in the high school auditorium with the kids from 3 other small schools met at High School orientation at the end of 8th grade, I could pick them out. They were so visible, like they were black lit. Every school had at least one: shoulders hunched in permanent wariness of attack, trying to blend into walls as their tiny forms, no matter tall they may have been, reflected the shriveled sprit within.
Whether you saw them or not, your school had them too.
Some people may think “bullying” is simply a couple kids calling the scrawny runt in school names in the hall between classes. The football players giving the occasional wedgie to Freddie Munz. It’s not. It’s a constant barrage of insults, shame and embarrassment and physical attacks. It’s theft, vandalism, manipulation & toying with their emotions, it’s verbal/mental abuse, physical abuse, anything and everything to degrade this particular child. To make their life a living hell in order for the rest of the community to feel superior.
We would toss adults in jail for doing such things. Why do we tolerate it in children? Isn’t that kind of a mixed message we send? "Hey it’s o.k. to beat up and degrade kids that are different from you when you are a child, but after you turn 18, funs over...or, you’d just better get more subtle and sneaky about it."? When we emphasize teaching tolerance to our children, are we also teaching them the tolerance of the other individuals that live next door, their P.O.V. and way of life? How can you expect the adult to be tolerant of other ethnicities when you haven’t even taught the child to be tolerant of the kids they attend school with everyday who have different interests and opinions?
Victims of bully suffer many the same emotional problems as those who have suffered abuse that the hands of a caregiver: severe depression, long term anxiety, crippling lack of self esteem, inability to make friends and trust people and more. It has even been suggested that this constant state of stress physically subverts the brain's normal development in children, making such emotional conditions physical ones and ergo that much harder to overcome. So if your child comes and tells you that their life at school is horrible and they would do anything to avoid it, do not simply sit there and tell them in some vague fashion that it will all get better when they grow up. They’re growing up right now.
And here’s one for parent who’s children bully. While you sit there mentally patting your son or daughter on the back for being the “B.M/W.O.C.” or complain to everyone how "no one understands" your child: 6 out of 10 children identified as bullies in school are convicted of a crime by the time they reach 24. Still think your kid is cool?
And many ask “Why don’t these kids simply attack back?” Why doesn’t a victim of spousal abuse leave her husband? It’s not just isolated incidents, this is an entire structure that children create and live within. It’s like Lord of the Flies, only it lasts a child’s lifetime. It’s “the way it is” and the child, their spirit utterly beaten down, believes that they are powerless to change it. And when you have years of social order and entire township (or four) of peers to work against, he or she may not be able to. At least not alone.
Unless they are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold or Jeff Weise.
Many people afterward talking about how mentally disturbed they were, about how they were part of the “Trench Coat Mafia” which was like a gang (it wasn’t, it was just a label, like “stoners”, which in my High School in CA we called “BL-ers” for “Behind the Library”, or “jocks”), but did one student come forward and apologize for their part in creating these two outcasts? It takes at least two to throw someone out of a society; The individual and the group and the blame for conflict that can result from that dehumanization belongs to both sides. When I entered the 8th grade, I had shot up in height to around 5’8” and during that year discovered that if I stood up, there was this uncertainly that came into their eyes. If I answered a challenge to fight, they backed down. And if I lunged at them, they would run like hell. Basically, after years of trying with all my soul to fit in, be nice, play by their rules and wondering what was wrong with me, I started to become violent and acting out. So that when I watched that terrible massacre at Columbine or read about the appalling tragedies at Red Lake reservation, I was horrified at what was happening, utterly appalled at this mass murder…but there was a small piece if me that understood it. Not the moral vacuum in these children’s minds that allowed for cold blooded, meticulously premeditated murder, but the rage and helplessness those frightening calculations sprang out of.
(Though Wiese seems to have many more flat-out mental and emotional problems stemming from his family history, as well as the hopelessness of living on one of the poorest reservations in the U.S., than the Columbine killers, yet still, how many had reached out to this kid who so obviously was headed down the wrong path?)
If my family had not moved to California, my parents were prepared to put me into a private school. Not that that would have worked because one of the bully’s was also going to the same school, so I was very lucky to wind up out here, but I know in my soul that had I remained in the school system of my hometown, I would have ended up one of three ways: dead from suicide, in a mental institution or in jail for assault and battery.
Given what has happened in the recent past, is shameful that any school administrator would fail to take any case of bullying seriously. This school administration in Kansas had five years to address the problem and they treated it as many of the internet population did: “What the big deal? What a whiner that kid is.”, just as my school administration probably thought “What the big deal? What a whiner that little girl is.”, just as the Columbine’s administrators probably thought “What the big deal? What whiners those kids are.”
$250,000 seems a small price to pay in lieu of another 10 or 13 children dead.
posted by KiplingKat | 11:34 PM
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