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Loren Capelli

Letters

How to Stop Bullying in the Schools

April 3, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “9 Teenagers Are Charged After Suicide of Classmate” (news article, March 30): The story of Phoebe Prince’s suicide after being bullied beyond despair is heart-wrenching.

Bullying is all about power: one person has it, one person does not. Technology accelerates bullying. Social media make it easy for bullies to enlist large, often anonymous groups to carry out relentless attacks with messages and compromising photos of the victim. Adults have been removed from the equation. We are not there to intervene.

Reluctant to seek help, victims feel ashamed and powerless, and fear retaliation should they “rat out” the bully. It is unrealistic to expect kids to make rational, self-protective decisions while under emotional stress.

Strong antibullying programs are needed to provide a means to report bullying anonymously, to train all school personnel to take reports of bullying seriously and to offer workshops for children on how to respond to being bullied.

Karen Schulte O’Neill
West Long Branch, N.J., March 30, 2010

The writer is on the executive board of the New Jersey School Counselor Association.

•

To the Editor:

I applaud the decision to charge nine teenagers in the bullying case that led to the suicide of Phoebe Prince, 15.

Now let’s look at the adults who must claim responsibility. Educators are mandated reporters of suspected child abuse. If it is true that some staff members were told and/or witnessed bullying and did nothing, they, too, must be held accountable in a court of law.

By natural extension, the parents or guardians of the nine accused students must be held morally and legally accountable for a lack of values that could lead to this kind of destructive disrespect.

The broader solution to bullying is to address and attack bullying in pre-school or earlier. It should be a part of the curriculum, as should self-esteem building.

Laws should reflect not only the horrific physical and emotional bullying but also the latest technology that allows for insidious cyberbullying.

Joan P. Kaufman
Hurley, N.Y., March 30, 2010

The writer is a retired instructional superintendent for the New York City Department of Education.

•

To the Editor:

Re “Playtime Is Over” (Op-Ed, March 27): David Elkind raises an interesting point regarding the possible relationship between the loss of playtime and the rise of bullying. The relationship seems intuitively obvious. What is not so apparent is how to replace the important normative life experiences that result from unstructured playtime.

In the “old days,” pick-up sports (stickball, stoopball, touch football) involved any child who was outside and willing to play. That meant children of all ability levels were included. As a result, good players learned tolerance, patience and acceptance from playing with weaker and perhaps younger players, and these weaker players learned skills from the better players. In different ways, each benefited from the experience.

In the absence of these spontaneously occurring opportunities for socialization, we need to develop programs that move beyond the Band-Aid approach, like the use of recess coaches.

Over the last decade, a number of “whole school” programs have been designed in which administrators, staff and teachers work together to reduce bullying among students. But perhaps it is time to expand the whole-school concept to include school-community partnerships involving community agencies and organizations like the YMCA and the Unified Sports program of Special Olympics.

Programs in which schools and community groups work together to create new recreational sports opportunities for children and youth at all levels — not just the athletically talented — are an important next step in addressing the bullying problem.

Gary N. Siperstein
Boston, March 28, 2010

The writer is director of the Center for Social Development and Education, University of Massachusetts Boston.

•

To the Editor:

I agree with David Elkind. Children learn kindness and how to get along with one another through play. I believe that the increase in bullying over the last 10 years is due, in part, to what children see and hear from the adults around them. After all, children are exposed to bullying words and tactics by elected officials, radio and television personalities, and, sadly, in some cases, their teachers.

Children take this in. They watch. They learn.

Judith Pack
Red Bank, N.J., March 29, 2010

The writer is an early childhood specialist.

•

To the Editor:

I am a public defender in Massachusetts who has represented juveniles, many of them teenage girls. “The Myth of Mean Girls,” by Mike Males and Meda-Chesney Lind (Op-Ed, April 2), misses the point. Physical violence is only one manifestation of mean-girl bullying. Mean girls use verbal abuse, intimidation and exclusion, and it’s most viciously directed at girls who are liked by popular boys, as we’ve seen in the recent tragedy in South Hadley, Mass.

While it’s wonderful news that girls’ arrest rates for violent offenses are down, that statistic doesn’t begin to measure the terrible damage being done to girls by, yes, “mean girls.”

Mara Dolan
Concord, Mass., April 2, 2010

•

To the Editor:

While the writers of this article may have a point, the only mean girls who mattered to Phoebe Prince were the ones who made her life a living nightmare. I know all about “mean girls,” having been victimized as a freshman at a Catholic girls’ high school in the early 1960s by five of them.

When they tried to resume their harassment at the beginning of my sophomore year, a senior (whom I did not know) stepped in on my behalf and shamed them into considering how their behavior was hurting me. They backed off and never bothered me again.

It took only one concerned person to help me; how sad and troubling that I have not heard about one student, teacher or administrator in that entire high school who had the courage to defend Phoebe Prince.

Dolores Soffientini
Holmdel, N.J., April 2, 2010

    How to Stop Bullying in the Schools, NYT, 3.4.2010, 
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/opinion/l03bully.html

9 Teenagers Are Charged

After Classmate’s Suicide

March 29, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM and KATIE ZEZIMA

It is not clear what some students at South Hadley High School expected to achieve by subjecting a freshman to the relentless taunting described by a prosecutor and classmates.

Certainly not her suicide. And certainly not the multiple felony indictments announced on Monday against several students at the Massachusetts school.

The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.

The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers.

In the uproar around the suicides of Ms. Prince, 15, and an 11-year-old boy subjected to harassment in nearby Springfield last year, the Massachusetts legislature stepped up work on an anti-bullying law that is now near passage. The law would require school staff members to report suspected incidents and principals to investigate them. It would also demand that schools teach about the dangers of bullying. Forty-one other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength.

In the Prince case, two boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face a different mix of felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, the Northwestern district attorney, said at a news conference in Northampton, Mass.

Appearing with state and local police officials on Monday, Ms. Scheibel said that Ms. Prince’s suicide came after nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats by a cluster of fellow students.

“The investigation revealed relentless activities directed toward Phoebe to make it impossible for her to stay at school,” Ms. Scheibel said. The conduct of those charged, she said, “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels.”

It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.

Christine Swelko, assistant superintendent for South Hadley Public Schools, said school officials planned to meet with the district attorney this week or next. “We will then review this evidence and particularly the new information which the district attorney’s office has but did not come to light within the investigation conducted by the school,” Ms. Swelko said in a statement.

Ms. Prince’s family had recently moved to the United States from a small town in Ireland, and she entered South Hadley last fall. The taunting started when she had a brief relationship with a popular senior boy; some students reportedly called her an “Irish slut,” knocked books out of her hands and sent her threatening text messages, day after day.

At South Hadley High School, which has about 700 students, most students and teachers refused on Monday to talk about the case. Students waited for parents in the pouring rain and a sports team ran by, with one student telling reporters, “Go away.”

Ashlee Dunn, a 16-year-old sophomore, said she had not known Ms. Prince personally but had heard stories spread about her in the hallways.

“She was new and she was from a different country, and she didn’t really know the school very well,” Ms. Dunn said. “I think that’s probably one reason why they chose Phoebe.”

On Jan. 14, the investigation found, students abused her in the school library, the lunchroom and the hallways and threw a canned drink at her as she walked home. Her sister found her hanging from a stairwell at home, still in her school clothes, at 4:30 p.m.

Some of the students plotted against Ms. Prince on the Internet, using social networking sites, but the main abuse was at school, the prosecutor said.

“The actions of these students were primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session,” Ms. Scheibel said.

Ms. Scheibel declined to provide details about the charges of statutory rape against two boys, but experts said those charges could mean that the boys had sex with Ms. Prince when she was under age.

Legal experts said they were not aware of other cases in which students faced serious criminal charges for harassing a fellow student, but added that the circumstances in this case appeared to be extreme and that juvenile charges were usually kept private.

The Massachusetts House and Senate have passed versions of an anti-bullying law, but disagreement remains on whether all schools will be required to conduct staff training about bullying — a provision in about half the states with such laws and one that is vital, said Robert O. Trestan, Eastern States Civil Rights Counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, which has led the effort for legislation in Massachusetts.

The prospective law, Mr. Trestan said, is aimed at changing school cultures and preventing bullying, but would not label bullying a crime because it is a vague concept. “These indictments tell us that middle school and high school kids are not immune from criminal laws,” he said. “If they violate them in the course of bullying someone, they’ll be held accountable. We don’t need to create a new crime.”

A South Hadley parent, Mitch Brouillard, who said his daughter Rebecca had been bullied by one of the girls charged in Ms. Prince’s death, said he was pleased that charges were brought. One of the students was charged separately in a case involving his daughter.

“My daughter was bullied for three years, and we continually went to the administration and we really got no satisfaction,” Mr. Brouillard said, adding, “I was offered an apology a few weeks ago that they should have handled it differently.”

The school has convened an anti-bullying task force, which met Monday, to help determine how to deal with bullying. “That’s the really clear message we’re trying to send — if you see anything at all, online, through friends, you have to tell us,” said Bill Evans, an administrator leading a group subcommittee.

The task force must also consider whether state law affects existing procedures. “The big question out there is what the legislature will impose on school districts,” Mr. Evans said.

Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., who has argued that proposed cyberbullying laws are too vague and a threat to free speech, said that he thought the charges announced Monday would pass legal muster. The sorts of acts of harassment and stalking claimed in the charges were wrong under state law, Mr. Silverglate said, but a question would be whether they were serious enough to constitute criminal violations, as opposed to civil ones.

“There is a higher threshold of proof of outrageous conduct needed to reach the level of a criminal cause of action, in comparison to the lower level of outrageousness needed to prove a civil violation,” he said.

A lawsuit involving another case of high school bullying, in upstate New York, was settled on Monday. A gay teenager had sued the Mohawk Central School District, saying school officials had not protected him.

In the settlement, the district said it would increase staff training to prevent harassment, pay $50,000 to the boy’s family and reimburse the family for counseling, The Associated Press reported. The boy has moved to a different district.


Erik Eckholm reported from New York,

and Katie Zezima from South Hadley, Mass.

    9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide, NYT, 29.3.2010,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/us/30bully.html

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