Is your child safe from bullies (part 2)

This is part 2 of a series I am writing about bullies in schools. This piece deals with what took place in the last decade of the last century. The next piece will deal with what is happening in the first decade of this century.

Going through twelve years of school is a challenge to any child and youth but to go through school as the butt of teasing by bullies and assaults by thugs is a student's hell on earth. In Japan, it has been so severe in some instances, that the victims have committed suicide rather then spend another day at school. In the United States, a youth shot to death another youth on the school grounds who was a bully who just wouldn't let up.

Who is to blame? That's easy. Everyone except the victims. I blame the parents of bullies who don't know how to bring up their children to be decent and caring or alternatively, who don't give a damn how their kids grow up, the school authorities who for the most part are indifferent to bullies in their schools, and of course, the bullies themselves--they are the creeps in the world who later turn out to be psychopathic in their relations with fellow human beings. They end up being the loudmouth losers of the world because no-one really likes a bully and they finally get left out of things and as a result, many become loners and continue being psychopaths in their relationships with their families, their acquaintances and their business associates. This applies to both boys and girls because both can be and in many instances, are bullies and thugs at school.

In Halifax County, Nova Scotia, Canada, an active 14-year-old boy named Ben was constantly bullied by an older boy when they were at school. The older boy threw Ben's books out the window, threw whiteout on his clothes, and roughed him up whenever he could. Then one day in February 1991, the bully slammed Ben into the stage in the gym. Ben, who suffered from a rare form of neurofibromatosis that affected his aorta, crumpled to the floor. He died of internal hemorrhaging. The bully who caused Ben's death was transferred to another school where he continued to bully smaller students.

On May 1, 1994, a 15-year-old thug was involved in a fight with two teen-age gangs in Hull, Quebec, Canada when he pulled out a knife and stabbed a 14-year-old student to death. The 15-year-old thug was convicted of manslaughter.

In November 1996, at the Vancouver Technical Secondary School in Vancouver, Canada, following an altercation, a few days later, a young 15-year-old thug came to school with a machete and slashed his earlier opponent three times across his back and the thug also sliced through nine tendons in his victim's wrists as the latter tried to protect himself. The 15-year-old thug was charged with attempted murder.

The number of Canadian students charged with violent offences rose from 9,275 in 1986 to 22,375 in 1995. The number of girls among these offenders rose from 1,728 to 5,125. Unfortunately, these figures are only the tip of the iceberg. The majority of violent crimes in schools go unreported. At present, approximately 5 percent of the students are responsible for most incidents.

As many as 14.4% of boys between the ages of 4 to 6 are bullies and 9.4% of girls between those ages are bullies. Between the ages of 7 to 9, as many as 14.8 % of boys are bullies and 7.9% of girls are bullies. Between the ages of 10 and 11, as many as 13% of the boys are bullies and 9.2 of the girls are bullies. Statistics Canada in 1998 showed that in the past 10 years, girls between the ages of 12 and 17 charged with violent offences has increased by 179 per cent. In Toronto, Canada, the total violent crimes reported to the police of that same age group rose from 242 reported in 1987 to 529 reported in 1987.

These brats are also disrespectful to their parents and teachers alike and bully their younger siblings. They tend to come from poor families and from parents who obviously couldn't care less about their children's upbringing.

Victims tend to come from dysfunctional homes where violence is not uncommon; therefore they suffer from anxiety even before they arrive at school. It's almost as if the school bullies are an extension of abusive parents.

Most kids don't condone violence in schools but whenever there is a fight, 85% will go to it and watch it. That's why it is important that the teachers be in the school yards rather than in the teacher's room drinking coffee during the time before the classes begin and during recess and the noon hour and right after school.

Toronto, Canada has a problem in its schools relating to bullies because much of it is gang related. Now the kids have to fear not only the bullies but the friends of the bullies, many who carry knives into school. In a two-month period in Toronto area schools, a 14-year-old took his father's .40 caliber Glock semi-automatic handgun to school and threatened another student with it. A 17-year-old was attacked on school property by gang members with a machete. Two students in a third school were stabbed in the head, neck and chest during lunch hour. I suppose that these events are considered rare when compared to other cities.

A study conducted by the Toronto Star, a Toronto newspaper, interviewed 1,019 students in 29 of the 275 public and Catholic high schools across the Greater Toronto area and 1 out of every 5 (22 percent) said that they felt unsafe at school. Part of the problem is that the students more often than not, keep their concerns to themselves. For example, only 1 out of 10 students would even report a violent incident to a school authority and only 3 out of 10 would bother to tell their parents or guardians of any violent incidents that happened in their schools. The 90 percent of the students that wouldn't report a violent incident to a school teacher are afraid that they won't be taken seriously or that the school won't do anything about their complaint. This is a direct result of the failings of the school system. Of course, another reason they won't report the incidents is because they are afraid of not getting protection from retribution.

In the spring of 1993, three violent incidents in Scarborough-area-schools (a borough in Toronto, Canada) shocked teachers, principals and School Board officials into action. In one incident, a 20-year-old dealer was apprehended in a school washroom in possession of a gun and narcotics, in another incident, a 17-year-old student walked into his school with a hand gun and in the third incident, an 18-year-old student stabbed another student at a dance in the latter's back and neck.

A Mississauga (next to Toronto, Canada) youth stabbed his mother 36 times with a kitchen knife when she came home from work and asked him to vacuum the house. On January 28, 1999 he was sentenced to prison for four years. The sad thing about this crime was that this young man was never in trouble before and his mother dotted on him so the question is asked, why did he kill his mother? It seems that for many years, this youth had been teased, abused and scapegoated unmercifully at school because of his eccentric behaviour compounded by his learning disability and awkwardness in speaking English. He was driven in the hallways of the school like a dumb animal and he was taunted by his fellow students to the point he didn't even know where he was. His teachers knew this was happening all the time and did nothing to protect him from all this abuse. His problems isolated him not only from his school but also his family. His mind couldn't take it any longer and he snapped just at the moment when another human being (his mother) began giving him instructions.

On May 28, 1975, a 16-year-old student living in Brampton, Ontario, felt that he was being picked on in school and went to school that day armed with a rifle and shot to death a student and a teacher before killing himself. That same year on October 27th, an 18-year-old student going to school in Ottawa, Ontario, entered his school, killed a student, injured four and then turned the gun on himself.

Things go really bad nowadays in schools when mentally disturbed students who can't take it any more have access not only to firearms but even explosives. The student massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999 is a good example of what happens when students are teased, ignored or dissed. (treated with disrespect) A diary kept for the previous year by one of the two student gunmen in the Columbine High School massacre showed they were ''going for the big kill'' in a suicide attack timed to mark Adolf Hitler's birthday. Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone said the diary described the assailants thinking as: ''We want to be different, we want to be strange and we don't want jocks or other people putting (us) down. We're going to punish you.'' Columbine seniors Eric Harris, 18 and Dylan Klebold, 17, had killed 12 students and a teacher with guns and explosives before killing themselves. The two even made a video for a video class at school in the fall 0f 1988 that depicted them shooting other students as they walked down the corridors, according to students who have seen it. In retrospect, the video looks like a rehearsal for the real thing. They had their friends pretend to be the jocks, (school athletes) and they pretended to be the gunmen shooting them. During the massacre, they were armed with sawed-off shotguns, a semiautomatic rifle, a pistol and homemade bombs stuffed with nails and shotgun shells. Some months before the killings, the two killers had their friends pretend to be the jocks, and they pretended to be the gunmen shooting them," junior Chris Reilly told Denver's Rocky Mountain News. "It was disturbing to everyone who saw it." One student, Brooks Brown, told Denver's KUSA-TV that Harris had threatened last year to kill him, even posting Brown's name on his own Internet home page, atop a list of people Harris said he wanted to kill. One member of the same clique of trench coat-clad outsiders - called the Trench coat Mafia - in which the gunmen belonged - described being taunted by other students. The youth told The Denver Post that life for members of his group as ''hell ... pure hell.'' He said that athletes (jocks) at the school called him ''faggot,'' bashed him into lockers and threw rocks at him as he rode his bike home. ''I'm not saying what they (the two young killers) did was OK,'' he said. ''But I know what it's like to be cornered, pushed day after day.'' There is no doubt in my mind that the two killers and their fellow trench coat mafia had alienated themselves from the rest of the students in the school because of their weird behaviour but it would have been better all around if the students, especially the jocks, hadn't teased them.

In Wimberley, Texas, five junior high school students were charged on April 23rd 1999 with conspiring to kill students and teachers in an alleged plot similar to a rampage in Colorado earlier this week. "The investigation determined that the group had started earlier this year to plan the assault on the school," a sheriff's department spokesman said. "Further evidence showed that they had targeted fellow students and teachers they were going to kill." The boys, all 14 years old, were arrested April 23, 1999 on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit arson and conspiracy to manufacture explosives. The superintendent of the school district says it had evidence of a "relatively detailed plan" for the attack. Authorities said a school staff member and several students notified them on the day of the student's arrest of the alleged plot. They apparently overheard the students on several occasions discussing their plan. Concerns about school violence in the wake of the Littleton, Colorado shootings may have prompted those students to take the alleged threats more seriously.

Practically all of the children who are bullied in school do not murder their fellow students but they still feel the pain they must endure as students who are ignored or picked on by their fellow students. One of the best examples of this was written up in a column of the Toronto Sun on May 1, 1999 by Steve Payne. In his column he spoke of a schoolboy he knew in England called Paul. The boy was non- descript, not good looking but neither was he ugly. He had no athletic ability and was made fun of when he tried out for various sports activities. He simply didn't fit in. He was therefore a loner and perhaps because of that, thought of, of being a bit weird. His classmates laughed at him and poked fun at him when the occasion arose. It got to the point where he would hide between classes so that no-one could taunt him. Finally the boy couldn't take it any longer. He decided to end all the tormenting once and for all. He walked into a train tunnel and laid across the tracks where shortly thereafter, an express train ran over him and ended his tortured life.

Payne made an interesting observation. He wondered if it would have been better for both of them if he had been a pal to Paul instead of a jerk. When I was in grade nine, there was a boy in our school that most of our classmates thought of as a nerd. When he approached me and introduced himself to me, some of my classmates warned me off saying that the boy was a nerd. Notwithstanding that, I found him rather interesting and we became good friends. I was the only friend he had in the school. During that school year, school year, I was living in a basement with my cot close to the furnace and was in effect, living alone. His friendship and that of his family meant a lot to me. They treated me as family and I remember with fondness, the memories of the outings he and I had with his family as the school year moved on.

When my youngest daughter was in grade three, she was being bullied by a grade four student who would wait for her just off the school grounds while my daughter was on her way home from school. Then she would beat up my daughter. When I learned of it from my daughter, I contacted her school and demanded that they contact the bully's parents and warn them that if it happened again, I would sue the parents for not having control over their daughter. My daughter didn't have any further problems with the bully. When I think back to 1941 when I was seven years old, I remember that every school day I was robbed by a 9-year-old boy living down the street of my penny my mother gave me for candy. If I had told my mother, the young thug would have stopped robbing me and I wouldn't have to pay him the penny every day to stop him from beating me up. Unfortunately, I didn't tell my mother.

It would be unfair to say that all our schools are not taking steps to stop this kind of behaviour because many are. For example, Harbour Collegiate in Toronto have let the students know that their complaints will be taken seriously and they are told how to report violent incidents. Blind spots were removed by the placing of mirrors in certain areas of the school, a portable classroom was removed so that a direct view of the street could be seen, a bathroom entrance in the basement was reconstructed to eliminate blind spots and security guards were hired as hall monitors.

At the Belen High School in New Mexico, students must pass a security check-point manned by a police officer and show their student's identification cards. The rest of the school is surrounded by fencing topped by barbed wire. They don't permit the students to use lockers. They must carry everything wherever they go in school. That way, students go directly to their classes when in school, thereby causing less opportunity for bullies to take over in groups of kids hanging about the lockers. Sixty-eight motion detectors and 16 high-tech cameras monitor their every move. School fights rarely occur in that school any more. Perhaps many of the kids think of themselves as being in a prison-like school but those kids that are in that school to get an education see beyond the high security and recognize the school as an institution of learning instead of a hangout for gangs in which attending that the school is a risk of one's life.

I am convinced that a great deal of these problems can be solved if harsh steps are undertaken by the school authorities against bullies and thugs.

Schools should have a zero tolerance for bullies and thugs and the bringing into school, knives or other weapons and against serious assaults. The bullies should be made to serve detention all day Saturday and the thugs who carry weapons into school should be automatically kicked out of the school, no matter what their age is at or what stage of their grades they are in. They should be transferred to a special school that is set up to handle these kinds of thugs. These young thugs should be sent to special schools that are right across town so it would be a real inconvenience to both the students and the parents for them to have to go to these special schools and especially for the purpose of keeping these school thugs from associating with the other thugs in their own neighbourhood while at school. These kinds of schools should be of a high security type with strict discipline with a security guard roaming the halls. If the student in this special school can go through an entire school year without problems of any kind, then they can return to their regular school. If the child is too much to handle in that special school, then incarceration in a training school should be the next step and if the offender is a youth over 15, he or she should simply be kicked out of school with no hope of further education being given to him or her unless they are privately tutored at the expense to his or her parents. Of course, if a child or youth is convicted of a crime, that young person may be incarcerated in any case and if she or he is, then they shouldn't be permitted to return to his or her regular school but instead finish his or her education in the special school.

This is harsh indeed but quite frankly, I see no reason to justify keeping these bullies and armed thugs in school so that they can humiliate, annoy, threaten and assault other students who are in school to learn.

On November 1, 1993, the Scarborough Board of Education approved a new zero-tolerance policy on violence and weapons---the first school board to lay out strict rules to curb school violence. Principals must now report all incidents and student thugs who commit acts of violence are suspended indefinitely and sent to a special program in Toronto that can deal with problem students like them. If they get through that program, they may get accepted back to their original school. Since the program's inception, none of the schools who participated in the program have re-offended. The results show that this concept works. In the following four years, weapons offences, threatening or assault, fell by 60 percent among the Board's 81,000 students. Potential thugs have been overheard to say to those they want to fight with, "You're not worth the trouble to get expelled for.” Many other schools elsewhere are following the lead of the Scarborough School Board.

Every British Columbia school child from grade 2 to 12 is given a card with the 'Youth Against Violence Line' phone number on it. More than 500 anonymous calls are made every month tipping off police to potential fights, assaults, weapon carrying and extortion.

I think some of the problems can be solved if the schools hire hall and yard monitors, such as security personnel such as they do in Belan, New Mexico. It will cost a lot of money but it is worth it if it will keep the bad students away and the good students in school.

At the Earl Beatty Elementary School in Toronto, 30 especially trained students began patrolling the playground wearing bright yellow vests with "Peacekeeper" emblazoned across their chests. They watch for children crying, an argument over a game or teasing and bullying and mediate. the concept has met with considerable success and other schools have adopted the program as a result.
Parents have a responsibility to ensure that their children are safe at school. There are tell-tale signs that they should look out for. They are;
1. Don't assume that missing money, a Walkman, jacket or bicycle is the result of carelessness.
2. If your child is skipping classes, it may because he or she is afraid to go to school.
3. Victims of violence often talk back at their parents.
4. Lack of friends is also a sign.
5. Loss of appetite, trouble sleeping or excessive secretiveness is also signs to look for.

In summary, let me say that it is time to take back our schools from the bullies and thugs and give them to our children who really want to learn. It's time to kick out the bullies, the criminals who carry dangerous weapons into school and the vandals who damage our schools. If these brats and thugs don't want to learn at an ordinary school, then transfer them to a tough school where nonsense is not tolerated and if they can't behave in those schools, then incarcerate them in closed youth facilities where they will get their education the hard way. And if they are over 15, kick them out of our schools so that these bullies and thugs can be used as examples to potential bullies and thugs as to what happens when these young psychopaths are removed from school and thrown into the world without a full education.

I think one of the saddest things that can happen to many of our youngsters is that they don't want to go to school anymore. If this is because many of them are afraid, then we as adults and taxpayers and parents should stand up for these youngsters and fight for their rights to a proper education--an education without fear. And if to achieve this, we must throw out of our education system those students who choose to act as bullies and armed thugs, so be it. If they are removed from the schools, then perhaps there will be little or no cause for the victims of the thugs, bullies and those that tease others, to return to the school and begin shooting up everyone they can find.

The United States Supreme Court in a divided decision in June 1999, ruled that schools can be sued and held liable for ignoring sexual harassment complaints by students. The court said that under a 1972 federal law, schools can be forced to pay damages for responding with complete indifference to a student's severe and pervasive sexual harassment by another schoolmate. The court did say however that the harassment must be of such a degree that it curtails the victim's opportunity to benefit from his or her education and opportunities. The ruling doesn't cover simple name-calling or teasing. The decision stemmed from a lawsuit in Forsyth, Georgia in which a fifth-grader was constantly groped and sexually attacked for six months and three teachers and the school principal did nothing after being told of eight incidents. I hope the school board fired the teachers and the principal.

I would rather deny one student out of ten an education if the remaining ninety percent of the students can go through school without being hassled by the bullies and thugs. That way, there is less reason for students to be quitting school at an early age or having their parents yanking them out of a school to avoid having their child harmed in her or his school by a school bully.