Comments on an online news site, below the story of Massachusetts District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel “throwing the book” at nine students for bullying Phoebe Prince to the point of suicide, show the expected public reaction: 90% of the comments are strongly in favor of the various criminal charges against the students, while 10% of the comments offer naïve notions that the victim was somehow to blame, or was somehow “different” enough to be responsible for her own death. “Lots of people are bullied, but they don’t kill themselves,” commented one reader, suggesting Phoebe was mentally off an acceptable balance– therefore an aberration that the other students, doing only what comes naturally, had unfortunately met up with and now were being made to suffer the consequences.

Phoebe was new to the high school this year, new to the area, and in fact to the nation, being from an Irish immigrant family. A relationship with an older male football star (who possibly was taking advantage, since he is charged with statutory rape) got things started, and led some of the other girls to assault Phoebe with calls of “Irish slut” and “whore” on a daily basis for the past three months. Following a “tortuous day” that the DA detailed in her press release, after Phoebe was verbally assaulted in the halls, in the library (with a teacher present), and then followed home with more catcalls and a bottle of juice thrown at her from a car, Phoebe hanged herself in her closet.

Certainly not the first of such sad situations, not even in the current school year, and not the last.

No charges are being laid against school staff, with the District Attorney indicating their lack of knowledge of the sometimes underground situation with the students prevented them from being fully responsible. Not entirely true, but she is looking at where charges have a chance of sticking in a court of law. Certainly in a bullying situation, the net is wide, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Staff are not blind, only blinded and hampered by regulations that frequently prevent effectively dealing with bullying, and their own unwillingness to get involved– that itself a damning indictment of any teacher, but a situation they are more and more being forced into. More than staff, other students are well aware of bullying, but are concerned about the silence code, about danger to themselves, and certainly have a lack of confidence in school staff and administration dealing with the situation. They choose to turn away, hoping someone else will solve the issue.

Bullying is a difficult situation to solve. There are workshops, there are speakers, there are movements, there are programs and policies that claim to put an end to bullying, and some of them have good effect, but situations still remain and return, because the best word to describe bullying is that it is “systemic”.

Not all students are bullies, thankfully only a minority are, and bullying situations vary with the students and incidents involved, but there are commonalities.

Self-esteem is often mentioned as a major factor, and this is true. Self-esteem both in the bully and the victim. Bullies take down vulnerable people in an attempt to make themselves feel better. Children develop a need, a powerful need to protect the Self. In some children, another child who is “different” presents a threat. Why does that fellow act like he does? Why does she dress like she does? What is wrong with them? There is something wrong, because they are not like me. Don’t they realize that I am OK? They are obviously not. They’re stupid. They’re ugly. They’re wrong. Their clothes are stupid. Their parents are stupid. What a bunch of losers!

A shoulder hit into the lockers, books falling all around the stupid dork as his stupid glasses go flying onto the stupid floor shows you how wrong he was. What a loser! Ronnie knows I’m cool. Ronnie’s smiling from ear to ear. He wishes he could do that too, but Ronnie’s really a dork too. Not like me.

That girl is looking at me funny, but she’s s loser too. Everybody knows that. Bunch of losers.

While you sometimes run into a disturbed and violent loner who bullies other students, most bullies appreciate being seen by friends and hangers-on, and expect that their actions will gain them status. Bullies often operate within informal gangs or cliques, particularly girl bullies, who like to hurt others with a cadre of like-minded students who make the bullied girl feel that everyone is against her. At times it must seem that they are. Sometimes the best of students are led by the mob mentality into watching, or even participating.

Self-esteem is an issue as well with the victim of the bullying. A lot of bullying is triggered when students decide another is “different” in some way: small, quiet, un-attractive, overweight, poorly dressed, or, quite commonly, gay. These differences are apparent to the victim as well, who might already have trouble fitting in– probably because the “differences” have been pointed out in the past. Students who are gay, or are simply identified as that by other students because of their behavior, are too commonly bullied, and these students make up a significant group of victims– victims who, struggling as well with sexual identity, sometimes choose suicide.

I’m of the opinion that most of us are not born with a lot of our faults, though I do know how powerful heredity can be in areas of personality. Some of them are taught to us, some are patterned for us, and some we pick up in our early travels and relationships. This is where the “systemic” aspect of bullying also applies. As a generalization, scratch a bully and you too often find a bullying household, where others are put down at the dinner table, where people are sliced and diced into those who are acceptable and those who are not, and where people of all ages are judged to be strange, crazy, stupid, or queer, and less than acceptable because of their race, ethnic background, or sexual orientation. Lessons learned at the parent’s knee.

One bullying situation that led to a suicide this year was fueled by a Facebook page ridiculing a student, a page started by a parent. With the complicity of the same parent, a male student later pretended to form an online relationship with the victim, then finally verbally abused and rejected her, all in a perverse idea of “fun”. The parent was first convicted of charges in relation to this, but then cleared on appeal.

It’s interesting to see that many of the news reports on the Massachusetts bullying of Phoebe Prince list the nine students charged, by name. With most of them 16 to 18 years of age, this would never happen in Canada. We would not allow their names to be published– why, they might be chastised and ridiculed by others. That wouldn’t be nice.

Even in the US, I can imagine that most of the charges will not stick in court, and likely the DA knows that– she is just getting the story out and saying, “Look, here they are, and here is their crime. Their behavior is not just playing games, not just students getting carried away– their behavior is Criminal. The courts might not support me, but I’m saying it.”

It’s a start. While some of the students might be bullies all their lives, and go from being schoolyard bullies to being workplace bullies, at least some of them might see their actions in a new light. “I never realized what we were doing,” some of them might eventually say. They might say they’re sorry and mean it. It could be a life-changing experience. The community is, of course, shocked into moving toward change. Hundreds of people met at the school to grapple with the sudden crisis. Unfortunately, it took the death of Phoebe to bring it about.

How do we change it? I really don’t know. Systemic. There is a benefit from school programs that foster the idea that bullying is not cool, that it’s all right to speak up against it, that it’s all right to report it. We need more of those. There is a benefit from a school taking a “no tolerance” policy against bullying, but the problem is enforcing that. We fall over ourselves in Canada in protecting the rights of people like bullies. The parents protect them (scratch a bully…), the school boards protect their education (while they disrupt that of others), the law protects their identity, the courts fail to consider school bullying as crime…

And young girls like Phoebe Prince are sluts and tramps, get chased home and bottles thrown at them. Go home to their lonely rooms. Hang themselves.

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