Bully Prevention

My son has a cleft lip, and other kids have been making fun of him. How can I help him handle the teasing?
– John

Most kids experience teasing at some point and it can be very difficult for them to handle. Kids with a cleft lip or other physical differences can be easy targets because the differences are so visible.

But you can help your son by encouraging him to express how he feels, showing him that you understand, and talking through some strategies for dealing with it. For example, teach him to be assertive (but not aggressive) and to use a proud voice to tell the child who is making fun of him to stop.

Other strategies might include ignoring or walking away, finding a “safe” person or a friend to be near, or telling a teacher or another adult. Some kids like to think of short phrases or jokes to say in response to teasing, but remind your son not to tease back, fight, or say something hurtful in return, which can only make the situation worse.

You also can help him become more resilient by offering your support, and encouraging activities and friendships that develop his strengths. Get him involved with organized activities — like music or sports — that he enjoys and where he can thrive.

Many schools now have programs to deal with bullying and promote positive relationships between kids, so you may want to talk with school personnel, such as a teacher, guidance counselor, or principal, about it. For instance, if teasing tends to occur in specific settings (like at the bus stop or during recess), work with school personnel to develop solutions.

If you’re concerned about ongoing issues or if you notice sudden changes that concern you (like your son doesn’t want to go to school, seems sad, or seems to have a hard time separating from you or family members), talk with a counselor or mental health professional for additional support.

Reviewed by: D’Arcy Lyness, PhD

By Randy Taran

Parents, it’s time to smell the coffee. We’re trying to get the schools to teach our kids not to allow bullying, but the problems are escalating; it’s no longer enough to leave the responsibility in the schools’ hands. No parent wants their child to be bullied. And, no one intentionally teaches their child to become a bully. We all want the best for our kids. This is why it’s interesting to take a look at the subtle bullying messages that can come to them on two levels. Here are two powerful and often hidden ways to help nip the problem in the bud — right at home.

The first and most obvious level is how we treat others. It’s almost normal to see sarcastic laughter at someone else’s expense, the “us vs. them” way of thinking, our own pressure to act a certain way or else risk not being accepted. That in itself influences our children. So, what to do? The answer, of course, is the Golden Rule — treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. Sounds good, but it only works if we are fully aware and mindful of what words and actions we are modeling.

Here’s a challenge: take one hour out of your day and just witness what you are saying, how you are saying it, and the feeling that it brings up in you and others as a result. This is a luxury that most people don’t allow themselves, and like wiping off your sunglasses to get a clearer picture, what you notice can be fascinating.

But there’s a second level, too, one we often don’t consider. Are you modeling bullying in how you treat yourself? If you mess up on something, do you ever call yourself an idiot? If you forget something important, do you say that you’ve lost your mind? If you gain a few pounds, do you say you feel disgusting or label yourself fat? All that seems benign, but it sends a message. Kids pick up on everything! Even small unconscious insinuations can be magnified more that we expect.

There is a biological reason for this. We all have mirror neurons (nerve cells) that fire either when a person acts or when they observe the same action performed by another. This means that if children see their parents being mean (to themselves or others), they are programmed by their neurons to imitate that. It’s a biological reaction for their neurons to fire in the same way. So parents have a huge role in influencing their children’s attitudes.

The media also has a tremendous impact on how we feel about ourselves. Just looking at magazines, TV shows and music creates ridiculous pressure on pre-teens and teens to look and act a certain way, so much so that if you don’t match the media’s ideal, then you can really feel badly about yourself. Let’s face it, even most grown women fixate on their “flaws” rather than celebrate what makes them unique. These messages are often passed on to our daughters, and sons, too, are not immune.

In the school environment, bullying enters the picture when young people try to compensate for their feelings of inadequacy by showing that they are “stronger” than someone else. Because a part of them feels bad about themselves, they try to reverse that feeling by treating someone else badly.

I just learned that my friend’s 14-year-old daughter is being bullied in her own car pool! She happens to be tall, slim and beautiful with long limbs. Still growing into her frame, every day she hears her “friends” making comments about how skinny she is, or how someone else who has the same top looks so much better in it. Other kids at school are being ostracized because they’re too big. And even the name-callers struggle with their body image. Rare is the person who is not sensitive to the slights and arrows of comparison with some external “ideal.” The “standards” of beauty that the media offers make most people feel bad! Getting into some physical activity like yoga, running, (whatever works) and seeing our bodies get stronger helps a lot. On the emotional side, getting to know our strengths and self-acceptance are powerful antidotes to any bully lurking in the wings.

The good news is that even in the media, there are signs of change. Marie Claire has a monthly feature called “What I Love About Me,” Katherine Schwarzenegger has a book out called “Rock What You’ve Got” and the DOVE campaign is blazing new trails. There’s actually a new club in my friend’s daughter’s school teaching students to appreciate their own bodies, no matter the physical dimensions. It happens that the whole car pool, even the girls who are behaving as bullies, decided to sign up for that club. This is good! As we learn to be more compassionate with ourselves, and to appreciate what makes us individually special and beautiful from the inside, we can do a lot to increase empathy and stop the bullying in its tracks.

Real strength is not in making someone else feel smaller; it’s rooted in being confident enough to be kind, uncovering what makes us unique and celebrating those qualities within ourselves and others. And it really helps to have some time to just observe our influences so that we can decide if they still suit us or not. If parents and kids can find some time to cultivate compassion for themselves, imagine what the mirror neurons would reflect.

One great way to deal with the bully inside is to find things that you are grateful for and appreciate about yourself. It could be anything: awesomely strong legs, beautiful eyes, a wild sense of humor or even a great smile. Focus on expanding that, and you may eventually turn that bully into a friend.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on bullying, as well as some of the things that you like or that amuse you about yourself.

Randy Taran is the founder of Project Happiness, a non-profit that empowers youth to create greater happiness in their lives and in the world. She is the co author, with Maria Lineger, of the “Project Happiness Handbook,” which makes the best of positive psychology, emotional intelligence and global literacy accessible to students in six countries.

NEW YORK – A constant news cycle of horrific bullying stories has some parents frequently intervening in their children’s social lives, but they may be dooming their kids in the process.

A mother picks her sixth-grade daughter, Cara, up from school. Cara looks upset.

The mother asks what’s wrong. Cara says her friend Annie was mean to her, calling her a “slut” and refusing to sit with her at lunch.

The mother is not surprised. She has never liked Annie, or Annie’s parents, the way they let their daughter wear skimpy clothes and buy whatever she wants regardless of price.

She is also aware that bullying is a widespread national problem that, according to everything she hears and reads, requires prompt adult intervention.

When she gets home, she calls the school principal and other mothers in her bucolic Massachusetts neighborhood to say that Annie has been bullying her daughter.

The news this year has been full of stories about kids whose lives were ruined—and in some cases ended—by the trauma of bullying.

Phoebe Prince, the Massachusetts high-school freshman who hanged herself in January after being relentlessly teased.

Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate exposed him as having a same-sex encounter.

Lexi Pilkington, who killed herself following months of harassment on Facebook. According to recent studies, about 15 percent of students are traumatized by bullying and as many as 30 percent may suffer significant harassment.

But a subject too touchy to broach with many parents is that some kids don’t need intervention, and that adult involvement in certain social situations can actually do more harm than good.

Some psychologists worry that all the klieg lights focused on bullying have left many hyper-vigilant parents, like Cara’s mother, unable to distinguish between genuine bullying and relatively minor conflicts that would best be left for a child to handle.

When parents intervene too readily, experts say, they damage their child’s ability to work out problems for themselves. They can also harm the child they accuse, who is not necessarily a bully, but an insecure or troubled kid who has simply acted out.

“Obviously if your kid feels pushed around or teased, it’s agony,” said Susan Engel, a psychologist and the author of the forthcoming Red Flags or Red Herrings?

“It’s not an overreaction to feel your child’s pain. That’s what parents do. The problem comes with the way parents deal with the pain. They need to ask, is this something that can be worked out, or is it something that requires me to call the school? They jump in now with the idea that bullying is a chronic problem whereas there is a big difference between the normal kinds of misunderstandings and conflict that can happen between kids—or anyone—and what is a pattern.”

One problem is the tendency of overanxious parents to “interview for pain” at the end of a school day.

Many parents fail to understand that bullying is defined as a repeated act of abuse, though psychologists say that extreme one-time incidents where, for instance, one child is targeted by a group or is harassed on the internet, can also qualify.

Isolated incidents of name calling, teasing, or exclusion, however, are usually just that: one-off incidents that, if left to a child to handle, can build strength and character in the way that resistance training can build a muscle.

But experts say that many anxious parents, eager to protect their children in an age of fear and uncertainty—or, perhaps, to settle scores from their own pasts—are defining Zero Tolerance against bullying to mean Zero Pain at all, taking it upon themselves to smooth every bump on their child’s social road.

“I want there to be a lot of bumps!” said Wendy Mogel, a psychologist and the author of The Blessing of a B Minus. “You know why? Because these children are going to go to college. They are going to go out into the world.

They are going to have a roommate who wants her boyfriend to sleep over every night, colleagues who won’t jump up and down to welcome them on the team. They’ll need emotional resilience and social street smarts to finesse all sorts of unexpected bumps.

But if parents go riding into school like a Viking on a horse whenever their child complains of unfair treatment or ruffled feelings, the children are actually deprived of rich opportunities to develop essential social skills.”

This is not the same as simply saying that “kids will be kids.” Recent research has given us a deeper understanding of just how damaging bullying can be to a child’s emerging sense of self. But in the same way that states and schools are working to improve their anti-bullying policies—adopting new regulations and consulting with experts about the development of newer ones still—so do parents need to refine their understanding of what constitutes effective intervention.

Cara and Annie’s situation may well have resolved itself on its own, but it only deteriorated when Annie found out about Cara’s mother’s phone calls and further tormented Cara—who then vowed never to tell her mom anything ever again.

“The standard shouldn’t be, is my child suffering a little, but is my child’s core sense of self in the process of being destroyed?” said Michael Gurian, a psychologist and the author of Nurture the Nature.

“The core self is that center of morality and strength that’s building every day. If that’s being destroyed we must intervene, but if it’s being teased a little then it’s best to let the child utilize his or her own assets to meet the challenge.”

Parents who intervene in bothering rather than bullying situations, experts say, are not only robbing their children of important learning experiences, but may be inadvertently sending the message they don’t trust their child to handle the situation.

This can have the effect of feeding the child’s vulnerability and actually increase the chance that they’ll be targeted by bullies. Conversely, parents who send the message “I know you can do this” increase the likelihood of their child going back to school with a shielding aura of strength.

And then there is the effect on the child who has been unfairly accused. “I’ve seen groups of mothers completely demonize other children,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist and the author of Best Friends, Worst Enemies.

“There are sometimes socially unskilled children who are impulsive or who have low frustration tolerance. They lash out, say unfortunate things, or sometimes hit. The parents decide that child is the class bully. Things are more complex than that. On a genetic basis, a child may have limited social skills. His or her parents may have limited social skills and be unable to help them navigate the situation.”

Another problem is what Thompson calls the tendency of overanxious parents to “interview for pain” at the end of a school day, which teaches children to see school and social interactions through a lens of fear and negativity. “When parents talk about a school being ‘so mean’ or a class being ‘so mean’ they are overlooking the power of children’s friendships and the thousands acts of love and tolerance in a school day,” he said.

But acts of kindness rarely make news. When we close our eyes, we don’t picture the girl who invites an awkward acquaintance to sit at her lunch table, the boy who pats a discouraged friend on the back. We see the doomed young face of Phoebe Prince. We recall the words Tyler Clementi is said to have posted on Facebook the day of his suicide: “all too much jumping off gw sorry.”

In a world where the dangers of bullying are flashing on our TV, computer and Blackberry screens 24/7, how’s a responsible parent to respond? When it comes to the Internet, experts advise parents to keep a close eye on everything their young children watch and do.

“Giving a child unlimited access to the Internet is like giving them a race car without a license,” said Dr. Mogel. When a child recounts something hurtful that happened at school, Dr. Mogel advises parents to ask themselves whether the incident can be viewed as a “challenge” rather than a “potential or guaranteed trauma.”

Parents should empathize with a child’s hurt feelings, ask how she plans to handle the situation, and, perhaps, help her figure out a strategy. Parents should keep an eye on the situation in coming days to see if it recurs, and they should also watch for signs that their child is losing their zest for life.

The key is to respond rationally rather than emotionally. Susan Davis, a psychologist and the co-author of Raising Children Who Soar, says parents should handle children’s distress the way they handle upsetting situations at work.

“You wouldn’t burst into your boss’s office and start to cry,” she said. “You would take a minute to collect yourself and think about how to respond. In other words, you would tap a different aspect of yourself. Obviously this is harder to do when your child is involved. Their pain gets to you like nothing else. But it’s your job as a parent to zip it up and think of what’s best for them.”

Lisa Wolfe has worked at 60 Minutes and written for The New York Times and O Magazine, among other publications.

Jennifer Cecilione – Staff Writer

Shooting. Stabbing. Bombing. All obvious causes of death. But what about bullying? Many often think of bullying as just poking fun at someone or fooling around. This is not always the case. In severe situations, such as Tyler Clementi’s, bullying meant death.

Clementi was a freshman at Rutgers University. He was also gay. On September 19, Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, posted on his Twitter that Clementi was having sex with another man in their dorm room. Ravi and fellow Rutgers freshman, Molly Wei, allegedly videotaped Clementi’s sexual encounter and posted it on Twitter for Ravi’s followers to view. Three days after Clementi discovered the video, he posted on his Facebook, “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” That day, Clementi leapt off of the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was only 18 years old.

Monmouth senior Kelly Gnadinger has had enough. She said, “This was a horrible thing. It was tragic. People should stop bullying others.”

Ravi and Wei were each charged with two counts of invasion of privacy, but could face even greater punishment. If convicted of these charges, they could spend up to five years in prison. According to ABC News, Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said that there may be the possibility of Wei and Ravi being charged with a hate crime, a more serious offense.      Under New Jersey law, hate crimes are categorized as crimes committed with the intent to “intimidate an individual or group of individuals because of race, color, religion, gender, handicap, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.”

Clementi is not the first gay male to commit suicide. Within the week that Clementi killed himself, three other gay boys did the same. All of these boys experienced harassment because of their sexual orientation. The youngest of these boys was Seth Walsh. He was 13 years old.

Openly-gay talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres said in a video posted to her website on October 1 that the recent suicides are a “wake up call to everyone” and that “bullying and teasing is an epidemic…four lives lost is a tragedy.” According to NJ.com, New Jersey state lawmakers have been trying to pass the “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights” for the past few years. This law would require new teachers to complete a bullying training seminar, require superintendents to produce a report describing their school’s encounters with harassment, punish school administrators who do not investigate bullying accusations, and make it possible to suspend or even expel students on the grounds of bullying. 

“It saddens me that gay youth feel they have no where to go,” said Mrs. Mitchell who started the Gay-Straight Alliance at MRHS. Mitchell holds GSA meetings once a week in room 510. The sign outside of Mitchell’s door reads, “People who think they are different can come here to feel they are the same.”

 According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, gay male children are about two and a half times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. Junior Aarti Aggarwal said, “I think people are more likely to bully gay kids because people always bully those who are different from them.”

Dan Savage, a relationship advice columnist, created the “It Gets Better” YouTube project to reach out to gay teens. “It Gets Better” is a collection of videos posted by celebrities urging gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender children to hang on for better days and not to end their lives prematurely. The message is that being gay gets better after the high school experience. The recent suicides forced even celebrity gossip expert, Perez Hilton, who is accustomed to trash-talking celebrities on his blog, to rethink his bullying ways. October 15, on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Hilton said, “I’m going to do things differently…I’m not going to call people nasty nicknames.” For his “It Gets Better” video, Hilton told his story of growing up attending a Catholic boy’s school and being ridiculed by his classmates and his teachers. He also said that as you grow up, you become more secure with yourself and everything really does get better.

By Bernice Yeung

Schools and prosecutors are grappling with the legal issues raised when harassment over the Internet  leads to suicide.

Earlier this month, a 14-year old boy from Middleburg, Pennsylvania threw himself in front of a tractor-trailer after leaving a suicide note that said he was tired of being called a “faggot” and a “sissy” at school.

It was the latest in a string of teen suicides tied to bullying. In September, Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi threw himself off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, and a woman who lived down the hall named Molly Wei, secretly recorded Clementi having sex and then broadcast the footage online. In January, a Massachusetts high school student named Phoebe Prince took her own life following persistent bullying by schoolmates. And in September 2009, 13-year-old Hope Witsell of Florida committed suicide after her topless photo was circulated around her school via text message.

The phenomenon has already earned its own catch-all name in the media and among researchers:  “bullycide.”

Although those who have been bullied contemplate suicide at a higher rate―and between 10 percent and 40 percent of American students report being bullied at school, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center―observers say the problem is becoming exacerbated by the Internet, which can quickly turn face-to-face harassment into a viral assault in cyberspace that exacerbates the pain and embarrassment suffered by the targets.

Cyberbullying, as it is called, has triggered a fervent debate in schools, in the courts and in state legislatures over the best way to address the behavior. As a legal matter, these cases exist within a confounding mix of emerging technology, free speech rights, criminal law and politics—all of which has experts scratching their heads.

The prosecutors’ dilemma

Going after cyberbullying isn’t an open-and-shut case. There is no agreed-upon definition for the term, and although behavior and activity associated with bullying and cyberbullying can become criminal acts, the words “bullying” or “cyberbullying” appear in very few state criminal statutes. (And states like Louisiana, which explicitly criminalized cyberbullying earlier this year, has been criticized by legal observers for enacting an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.)

As a result, prosecutors have relied on existing criminal statutes, including stalking or harassment. Most states have begun to incorporate language about the use of smart devices and social media into existing stalking or harassment laws, but these laws run the gamut, says Suzanna Tiapula, director of the National District Attorneys Association’s National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse. “Some of these statutes have not been tested. There is a desperate need to respond appropriately, so states are trying to craft solutions. But they are relatively new and there are a range of responses to trying to protect children and adults.”

In the Prince case, where classmates reportedly called the recent Irish immigrant lewd names and threw a can at her head, local efforts to pursue justice focused on prosecuting six students at her school who allegedly led the verbal assault. The indicted students face criminal charges ranging from stalking and harassment to violating Prince’s civil rights, leading to injury. At least three of the teens are slated to go to trial in early 2011. Local prosecutor Elizabeth Scheibel filed charges based on anti-stalking and civil rights statutes, some of which legal analysts say are an uphill battle. (District Attorney Scheibel did not return calls seeking comment.)

In the Rutgers case, Ravi and Wei have been charged with numerous counts of invasion of privacy, and a criminal investigation is ongoing in the case. Prosecutors in Middlesex County, which is handling the case, even hesitate to call the Rutgers incident a cyberbullying case.

“We are not framing it that way,” says Jim O’Neill, the spokesperson for the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office. O’Neill says that no court dates have been set, and that the prosecutor’s office is “looking into a variety of potential charges,” including a hate crime, because Clementi was taped having intercourse with another man.

Charges such as the violation of civil rights leading to injury in the Prince case, or the manslaughter charges that some advocates are pushing for in the Rutgers case, may be difficult to prove.

“There is always the problem of causation, which is the underlying principle of every criminal charge,” observes Patrick Corbett, a criminal law professor at Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan. “The question is: was the defendant’s action what caused the suicide? It’s not an easy case for the prosecutor to work with.”

Experts note that suicides, in particular, are difficult to pin to one specific cause. “I don’t think you can say that there is a direct cause and effect between being bullied and making the decision to commit suicide,” says Susan Swearer, an educational psychology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who specializes in bully intervention. “Bullying is a factor in the suicide, so there are lots of questions in these cases.”

Indeed, criminal prosecutions don’t always lead to convictions. Most famous, perhaps, is the case against Lori Drew , a Missouri mother who hired a teenager to create a fake My Space profile and posed as a 16-year-old boy in order to spy on one of her daughter’s former friends, Megan Meier, because Drew feared her daughter was being badmouthed by the teen.

Using the false identity, Drew sent Meier a number of messages through My Space, including one that read, “The world would be a better place without you.”  That message, according to prosecutors, tipped the 13-year-old Meier over the edge.  She killed herself in 2006.

Prosecutors admitted to reporters at the time that they did not have enough evidence to pursue stalking or harassment charges, and an attempt to criminally charge Drew under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act eventually led to an acquittal.

Determining ‘intent’

Criminal prosecution in some bullying cases is particularly challenging because in addition to causation, the prosecution must also show intent, and some incidents that have been dubbed “cyberbullying” may not meet the standard.

“What is important here is not how the victim feels, but what the putative offender knew or intended,” says Franklin Zimring, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. “This is to protect civil rights—it must be behavior such that the person committing it knows is extreme. We need to set the bar high for criminal liability.”

When it comes to more serious criminal charges, like murder or manslaughter charges that have been called for in some bullycide cases, “you either had to be negligent or intended the harm before you can be criminally liable for it,” Zimring says.. “If you’re saying that hurt feelings and deception were intended [through the bullying], well, hurt feelings and deception are two dishes often served during adolescence, and sometimes the scope of cyberspace makes things worse, but I’m not sure that’s going on a lot [in terms of the law].”

But Zimring says he understands why district attorneys choose what is perhaps a difficult legal path. “It’s great publicity for the prosecutor and it ‘sends a message,’” he acknowledges. “And it is a symbolic vindication of the victim and of the family’s loss.”

Despite the challenges in criminal court, we may begin to see more prosecutions in bullycide cases, as law enforcement and prosecutors become more attuned to them, says Scott Burns of the National District Attorneys Association, who adds that his members do not feel “a reluctance to prosecute these cases.”

Wendy Murphy, a law professor at New England School of Law in Boston, startled some audience members at a symposium on cyberbullying in October when she told prosecutors to “grow a pair” by prosecuting bullies.

“Prosecutors bring one case once against a bully and people pay attention,” she told The Crime Report later. “It makes a difference. This is not to beat up the bullies, but I think we should respect life enough to be able to say to the bully that if someone kills themselves, you bear the burden. That one consequence is criminal prosecution.”

Naturally, not everyone agrees.

“Bullying prevention is a wonderful idea, and criminal law is a terrible tool for it,” argues UC Berkeley’s Zimring.

According to research by Swearer, the education psychologist, bullies themselves often experience higher rates of social anxiety and depression. “It’s important to look at intervention, not just at throwing the book at these kids,” she says. “There’s got to be a consequence. We’re not taking the time to figure out why someone is doing this, and helping them to see that this is not okay.”

Are schools liable?

Schools can be challenged in court for bullycides, too. But these cases raise another set of legal questions: Where to draw the line between what’s free speech and what’s unacceptable bullying?

Schools and courts have typically relied on the decision in the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a case that focused on the rights of Iowa students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The Court ultimately held that in order for a school to intervene, the student speech must “materially and substantially interfere” with the operations of the school or it must “impinge upon the rights of others.”

With some cyberbullying taking place off campus, it’s less clear how educators should interpret Tinker.

“What a kid types in their bedroom, the school has no legal control over,” says Daniel Weddle, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who studies bullying. “There is a nexus [between the school and the off-campus speech], but it’s not clear where the nexus should be. The courts are really struggling with this question.”

Those struggles are less acute in the Rutgers case. “There is much less control in higher education because we’re dealing with legal adults,” Weddle says. “In terms of liability, it’s harder to get universities on the hook for not intervening.”

Some courts say that if it’s “foreseeable” that the speech would create a material and substantial disruption during the school day, then the school has the right to step in.

Meanwhile, Weddle notes that other courts have said that even if the questionable speech reaches the schoolhouse door, educators don’t necessarily have jurisdiction over it. (Educators and attorneys are watching two Pennsylvania cases to gauge where to draw that line. A Third Circuit court decision on both is pending.)

“We see administrators who are really unsure about how far their disciplinary arm can reach,” notes Kathleen Conn, author of The Internet and the Law: What Educators Need to Know . “The First Amendment doesn’t protect true threats, but what is a true threat? It’s a legal term of art that varies in its interpretation from circuit to circuit.”

In cases where the target’s family has tried to take schools to court, the schools have typically settled or won.

“Normally, you don’t hold one person liable for the actions of another person,” explains Weddle of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “So to hold schools liable for the acts of its students, you have to show that the school could control the action, and its failure to control the action was the proximate cause of the injury.”

The White House steps in

In late October, the U.S. Department of Education, jumped into the fray, with an assist from President Barack Obama.  The department issued an “advisory” on bullying that was intended to provide guidance on identifying and reporting harassment.

“We have an obligation to ensure that our schools are safe for all of our kids,” Obama said in a statement following the late October release of the advisory. “Every single young person deserves the opportunity to learn and grow and achieve their potential, without having to worry about the constant threat of harassment.”

But critics say that the advisory is just that—advice.

“Advisories are as low as one can go—I’d liken them to op-eds, frankly,” argues New England Law School’s Murphy, “[They are] published sentiments using moral suasion to change behavior.”

In that regard, the Department of Education advisory isn’t too different from state anti-bullying legislation. Currently, 43 states have anti-bullying statutes, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center, but these laws only provide guidance and regulate schools and public libraries.

These laws—most of which came online in the past year or so—feature a mix of measures, ranging from the creation of prevention and intervention programs at schools to mandates requiring specific anti-bullying policies and the reporting of incidents to the school administration or law enforcement.

Such laws are “much ado about nothing,” claims Weddle.  “They often require nothing more than a policy that says bullying is bad, but sidestep training and any attempt to change the culture of the school.” The other problem with the statutes, Weddle says, is that they often don’t provide a way for parents or students to take schools or districts to court if the anti-bullying laws aren’t being followed.

The Massachusetts anti-bullying law was enacted in May in response to the Phoebe Prince case, and it requires that each school create a bullying prevention and intervention plan. It has been praised by prosecutors and law enforcement for clearly defining the term “cyberbullying,” and for raising awareness of the issue.

Though it, too, does not provide an avenue for individuals to hold the schools or districts accountable in court, it does create a special commission that will investigate the possibility of imposing criminal and civil liability on parents of bullies.

Federal laws, such as the Safe Schools Improvement Act, are not necessarily any more effective, according to Kathleen Conn, who is also a law professor at Neumann University in Ashton, Pennsylvania.

“These federal laws go into vacuum,” she says. “They never reach down to individuals. You can pass all of the anti-bullying laws you want at a federal level, but if you don’t disseminate and you don’t fund them and if you don’t monitor effectiveness, then why waste the paper?”

The role of civil rights

Ultimately, the New England Law School’s Wendy Murphy, who calls herself a child advocate, says the problems that schools and courts have had in locating bullying’s proper place in the criminal and civil law has to do with the current refusal to acknowledge the underlying civil rights issues at play.

“We need to deal head-on with the nature of this problem as a civil rights issue,” she says. “We are framing what is historically known as targeted civil rights harassment. We have policies, procedures, and a long history in the law of dealing with bullying, as long as we call it what it is, which is harassment.”

She continues: “If a child is targeted, and if it is sex-based and gendered, as most cases involving suicide, if you call it bullying, you’ll get a tort response. But if you go to the school and call it a Title IX problem, a sexual harassment problem, or harassment because of sexuality, and you frame it that way, it will prompt an effective response.”

For Phoebe Prince, the lesson has come too late.

If her parents had taken the issue to court on the grounds of sexual harassment, Murphy suggests, Prince “would still be alive.”

Bernice Yeung is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco.

Sue Loughlin The Tribune-Star The Tribune Star

TERRE HAUTE — When high school students talk, middle school students listen.

That’s why a group of 84 Terre Haute North Vigo High School student leaders visited three middle schools Wednesday morning, part of a bullying prevention initiative.

Announced last week, it’s called HERO, which stands for Helping Everyone Respect Others.

The high school leaders went to Chauncey Rose, Woodrow Wilson and Otter Creek middle schools.

At Wilson, small teams of high school students visited each advisory class. In one, North senior Marlin Hill led the discussion.

When someone is bullied, the simple act of being a friend could save that person’s life, Hill told a group of eighth-graders. 

“As eighth-graders, you guys are kind of the head honchos of the school,” Hill said. “You have the sixth- and seventh-graders looking up to you.”

He urged them to take the lead by respecting others, being a friend to those who need one and stepping in when bullying occurs. Stepping in might be a matter of contacting an authority figure, such as a teacher or dean, either when the incident happens or afterward.

“I’m asking you not only now but in the future to respect other people and be a friend because you could be the deciding factor between someone taking their life and leaving this Earth,” Hill said.

Hill was joined by North students Brooke Humphrey and Anna Potter. Hill and Humphrey are Link Crew leaders, while Potter is part of the A-team.

The sessions, less than 30 minutes, also included activities and statistics. Students talked about different types of bullying, which can include physical, mental and cyber bullying.

The North students cited a statistic that 8 percent of students miss one day of class per month for fear of bullies.

“Can you imagine missing class because you feel like if you were to walk into a school, no one there is going to respect you?” Hill asked.

Socially isolating someone also can be a form of bullying, and so is spreading rumors, he said.

When the middle school students were asked what they would do if they were bullied, one responded he would tell his closest friend, while another said he wouldn’t tell anyone.

The middle school students also were told that if they wanted to report bullying but feared repercussions, they could talk privately to a school authority figure, and their confidentiality would be protected.

Afterward, Wilson eighth-grader Allison Crick thought the anti-bullying program “was really good because they are high schoolers and we all look up to them.”

Wilson student Ashaun Miller believes the high school students’ visit will reinforce to middle school students that they can take steps to prevent and stop bullying.

Miller said he would step in if he witnessed bullying. If someone is afraid of being labeled a snitch, they can tell a teacher or dean privately, he said.

This week kicks off the HERO anti-bullying campaign, organized by several middle and high school administrative interns. The project is aimed at middle school students but involves high school student leaders.

In the near future, student leaders at South Vigo and West Vigo will work with their respective middle schools, said Joe Thoma, spokesman for the principal interns group that developed HERO.

This week, middle school teachers have been showing anti-bullying videos, and today, they are expected to conduct additional classroom activities.

Friday will be “big blueout day,” and middle school students will be asked to wear blue and they will be given blue “I am a HERO” wristbands. Blue is the color being used in national anti-bullying campaigns, Thoma said.

Wednesday’s sessions did lead to some open discussions, Thoma said. A few middle school students who say they have been bullied shared that information with the high school leaders.

The information was provided to counselors or other school officials so that those middle school students will receive the help they need, Thoma said.

The middle schools have HERO boxes, where people, including school employees, can nominate students who have stopped or prevented bullying.

The Vigo County School Corp. website also has a HERO link where bullying incidents can be reported. The site also includes an anti-bullying brochure.

(TRENTON, N.J.) — Lawmakers in New Jersey will hold hearings Monday on a bill to toughen the state’s anti-bullying laws.

New Jersey has had an anti-bullying law on the books for years, but state politicians say it hasn’t really helped.  They want teachers to be trained on how to recognize and prevent harassment, and they want them to report bullying even if it happens off school grounds.

The proposed legislation follows the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge after a video of himself and a male involved in a sexual encounter was streamed online by his roommate and another student.

It is estimated that a third of all students between the ages of 12 and 18 have been bullied at school.

Copyright 2010 ABC News Radio

By: Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children’s Defense Fund

The problem of bullying in our nation’s schools has been in the headlines again, in large part because of a heartbreaking series of recent tragedies: children and youths who took their lives after they were bullied or harassed because their peers believed they were gay. We need to immediately send a clear message to all our children that bullying and harassment for this or any other reason is simply not acceptable. At the same time, we need to make sure that every child knows she or he is a gift from God and feels loved and accepted and valued the way they are.

President Obama was one of the thousands of people who recently chose to record a video statement for the “It Gets Better” Project, started in September by journalist Dan Savage who is collecting and posting messages of hope and encouragement to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youths who might be experiencing harassment or bullying or feeling isolated and desperate right now. The President said, “We’ve got to dispel the myth that bullying is just a normal rite of passage – that it’s some inevitable part of growing up. It’s not. We have an obligation to ensure that our schools are safe for all of our kids. And to every young person out there, you need to know that if you’re in trouble, there are caring adults who can help…You are not alone. You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t do anything to deserve being bullied. And there is a whole world waiting for you, filled with possibilities. There are people out there who love you and care about you just the way you are…The other thing you need to know is, things will get better.”

It will get better—and adults need to do everything possible to be sure that for these youths and all other children and teens who are being bullied or harassed today, it gets better right now. Earlier this year, the first—ever Federal National Bullying Summit was held in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention Steering Committee, a collaboration between the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Interior, and Justice. In his opening remarks Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that in 2007 nearly one out of three students in middle school and high school said they had been bullied at school during the school year, and one out of nine secondary school students, or 2.8 million students, said they had been pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on during the last school year. Secretary Duncan made clear that the government is committed to enforcing laws against harassment wherever they apply and doing all else possible to keep schools and students safe. The Administration has already planned several next steps for the coming months, including a White House conference on bullying early next year and a series of workshops the Department of Education will hold for educators across the country.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recently reminded school districts that harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex, or disability violates federal civil rights laws, so in every instance where a school “knows or reasonably should have known” about this kind of harassment, it has the responsibility under federal law to end the harassment, eliminate any hostile environment and its effects, and prevent the harassment from recurring. Schools have this responsibility even if the misconduct is already covered under the school’s discipline policy, and regardless of whether a student has complained, asked the school to take action, or identified the harassment as discriminatory. Adults must simply take charge—as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlyn Ali put it, it is the school’s responsibility to “stop it, fix it, and prevent it.”

But bullying can take many forms, for many reasons—and bullying that does not violate these specific federal guidelines is still serious, dangerous, and wrong. The Department of Education outlined a list of negative effects of bullying and harassment: lowered academic achievement and aspirations; increased anxiety; loss of self-esteem and confidence; depression and post-traumatic stress; general deterioration in physical health; self-harm and suicidal thinking; feelings of alienation in the school environment, such as fear of other children; and absenteeism from school. In an age where technology is making cyberbullying and other new kinds of harassment an even more widespread threat, it is more important than ever that all adults—starting with every single parent—be sure our children understand that any kind of bullying is not acceptable and will not be tolerated. Studies show many youths who bully others have been mistreated themselves but even this can never be an excuse. It must simply add to the urgency we all feel about stopping the cycle right now.

Popular Talk Show Host Apologized for His Generation, Says Kids Need Ongoing Dialogue with Parents

Dr. Phil McGraw on "The Early Show." (CBS)

(CBS) 

More than 160,000 children miss school every day because they are scared of being bullied, according to the National Education Association.

Bullying is a national problem, often with tragic results. But Dr. Phil McGraw, host of the popular show “Dr. Phil,” has begun a fight against this behavior, delving into the topic several times on his show and even traveled to Washington, D.C. in June to bring the topic to the fore. While in the nation’s capital, he spoke in front of the Subcommittee on Healthy Families about the prevalence of bullying and the serious public health and safety risks associated with cyberbullying.

On “The Early Show” Thursday, Dr. Phil appeared on the broadcast to talk about what he’s now calling a childhood epidemic.

Dr. Phil explained, “I said nine years ago when I started the ‘Dr. Phil’ show one of the things we would focus on are the silent epidemics in America. I’m trying to make this not silent. I want us to tune in and know what’s going on here.”

Co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez remarked, “These keyboards bullies have the benefit of hiding behind their computers and it’s so easy for them to target vulnerable people.”

“There is no empathy involved here,” McGraw replied. “When you are not having to look at your victim, when you don’t see the pain in their face, when you don’t see their eyes, then it’s so much easier for you to say cruel things. And crueler things are being said than would be said person to person. And, you know, the thing that I’m worried about, Maggie, is these bullies have parents. Where are the parents of these bullies? How do they not know what their child is doing either on the school bus, at school, on the keyboard, wherever it may be?”

In a recent show, Dr. Phil apologized to children.

He said, “On behalf of all the adults that seem to be running this society, I am so sorry. I just — I am so sorry that this is going on in this society. I’m so sorry that gay is a slur.”

On “The Early Show” Dr. Phil said, “I just hate for (gay children) to think that nobody cares, that all the adults in this world that are not doing anything don’t care. … It sends a message and these kids, think, look adults don’t get it. They don’t care. But that’s not true, we do get it and we do care and we need to let them do that and do something about this.”

But how do you prevent tragedies like Tyler Clementi’s suicide after allegedly being videotaped by Rutgers classmates from happening?

To Dr. Phil, prevention starts with education.

“I’m sure that people don’t think — because I’ve talked to a lot of bullies that have now grown up — and they say, you know, when I was doing that, I had no idea the impact that it had. I was not aware of the pain it was causing. Well, let’s make them aware now. Let’s teach these kids that words are powerful and that, when you say things that cut into someone, it changes who they are. You say it, then they go home and repeat it to themselves a thousand times. And it changes their personality. It changes their future. It changes the way they raise their kids when they grow up.”

He added, “If we turn a bright light on over this maybe parents will have a sit-down with their kids and say, ‘I want to talk to you about bullying. Are you being bullied and are you a bully?’ Let’s have those conversations — not a conversation — but a dialogue they need to have.”

For parenting tips from Dr. Phil on the bullying warning signs and what you should do if you think your child is being bullied, click on the video below.

Monday, November 1, 2010

 A recent poll getting a lot of attention says that half of the students in our high schools admit to having bullied someone in the past year. That’s hard to believe.