A Foxboro, Massachusetts girl was hospitalized earlier this week after her school peers hounded her to almost-death over a period of months.
The girl, an eighth-grader at a local middle school, claimed that the majority of the harassment occurred during after-school sports meetings and centered around the young victim being slut-shamed. The eighth-grader’s mother said that the precipice of the bullying occurred when her daughter received threatening phone calls on her birthday and messages like the ever-popular “whore.”
The young girl remains hospitalized for “emotional distress” still, and hospital representatives claim that they will not allow the girl to return to school until the school has a signed safety plan in effect.
Local law enforcement state that they are treating the case as a criminal harassment investigation at this time and will charge other students if it’s considered necessary.
It seems like every time you turn around anymore, there are kids being hospitalized for a school-bully beating, committing suicide because of slut-shaming and now emotional breakdowns are being suffered by children that haven’t even reached high school age yet.
What’s going on in our society that’s making this such a prevalent issue? Is it because the media is so overwhelmingly in our faces all the time and it’s merely publicized more nowadays than, say, twenty years ago? Are children of these decades being raised to hate and harass those that they don’t understand? Do today’s children have a serious lack of thick skin?
Thoughts?
Damn!!
No one I knew at my high school was EVER this nasty! Hell, I never even noticed anyone getting bullied.
I won’t rule out bullying being very effective these days. I think the online life matters too, compared to a time when leaving school for the day meant leaving schoolmates their as well.
But I’m putting in my biggest vote for thin-skins. Today’s children are taught that they are precious flowers, special just for existing, and that the whole world awaits their presence. They have everything done for them up to ridiculous ages, and are given few chances to fend for themselves. Parents and teachers and instructors make all decisions for the child. People jump on every slight, and try to walk kids through reconciliation when a bad word is said.
Today’s kids have no experience in working out their own problems, or struggling with adversity, or anything that forces them to think for themselves. They look to adults when things go wrong, and expect others to solve their problems.
I’m not surprised at all that more and more require hospitalisation and extensive therapy for bullying.
I agree. In my day if someone called a girl a slut she’d either be secure in the knowledge that she was not or she’d acknowledge that yeah, she was a bit of a whore. I was bullied in school but I didn’t even notice the half of it. My dad died when I was 8 and there were kids who found that fact really funny and went around chanting about it on the playground. I just thought it was a really weird thing to tease someone about and wondered why they didn’t come up with something more original and relative.
Kai, I agree that many parents do baby their children too much; however, I think it is incredibly callous of you to label every child who has been the victim of bullying as some kind of thin skinned pansy. That is more than obtuse. I would be willing to bet that you would be the type of parent who breeds bullies – excusing or not even noticing behavior that obviously indicates a child is a rude, manner-less little shit who needs to be picked on a little bit more by their own parents.
If you reread the first part of my statement, I am not trying to label every victim of a bully as thin-skinned. I said that that is where I would put *primary* blame. I also addressed that I can’t rule out bullies just being more effective these days, and that I think our 24/7 connected culture probably breeds a lot more opportunity.
I am not saying it’s all. But I do think that the lack of resilience in today’s kids is probably related to a lot of the extra need for hospitalisation and therapy which a child from a generation or two ago could have handled themself.
As for then projecting onto my parenting skills, that was a really silly and unnecessary jump to ad hominem. Was your argument so weak that you had to insult as well?
I believe that the best way to raise children is to let them try things, explore, and both make mistakes, and figure out how to fix them. I think it is important that children learn from a young age to respect their parents and other people, and that actions have consequences, and that while loved, they are not the most important thing in existence, and must work in the world around them.
It’s funny that you read my argument against permissive parenting, and assume from it that I would be an overly permissive parent…
But you’re right in the end. All three of my kids are constantly getting in trouble for bullying at school. I’m not sure what I did wrong.. :D
haha imagine that
you don’t even have kids….
I have to agree with you, though. Kids are babied from the get go.
Let them fail , let them learn.
QUIT HOVERING!!!
*I* know that, Blurry. And *you* know that. So I figured I’d mess with the newbie who already finds me so inferior.
Being of this generation, most of my classmates did have helicopter parents and were big babies who had unprotected sex with EVERYONE. Slut was pretty much a badge of honor, and though we all started out thin by high school half my grade were fatties or at the very least chunky monkeys. Anyway done bitching about them, yes they were thin skinned and it is a problem.
Worst thing that ever happened to me personally at school was someone thought it would be funny to spit in my newly opened drink, so I dumped it over his head.
Good for you! I don’t understand why people will just take bullshit like that.
Honestly I was never bullied, they thought it would be funny and I simply disagreed…with a bottle full of 1.50 liquid.
That’s pretty much my feeling too. Most of the stuff was just so totally lame and I always felt that most of the bullying I received was stating the obvious. I had trouble pronouncing my Rs as a child and people would imitate the way I talked. I guess that would upset some people but I knew I sounded funny when I talked and I knew I was working on it so it just rolled off my back. Kids calling me fat? Well, duh! Did they think I didn’t own a mirror?
I grant that a lot of people don’t have the same temperament. But I feel similarly. I was ‘bullied’ as a kid. It just never did much, because it never worked. I didn’t take any crap from other kids, so unless they were going to gang up into massive physical thing (i realize this happens to some people), it just wasn’t all that interesting for them.
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“What’s going on in our society that’s making this such a prevalent issue? Is it because the media is so overwhelmingly in our faces all the time and it’s merely publicized more nowadays than, say, twenty years ago? ”
It’s this.
I was bullied for 7 years, starting in about 2nd grade. In grade school, it was shaming — not slut-shaming, but still shaming — and it got physical in 7th grade, when a girl gang I had gym class with started targeting me because I didn’t fight back. It only stopped when three other girls in the gym class intervened.
The school back then was completely inept when it came to handling the situation — making me come in to the principal’s office along with all my bullies and having us each talk one-on-one in front of the principal to try to “work things out”. And of course they spouted out a whole line of bullshit about what they were doing, and why they were following me around, and the principal bought it, and just let them off with a warning. It was only the other girls in class being very visible about gathering around me that fended them off.
There have always been bullies, and schools have always been totally inept when it comes to handling it (that “signed safety plan” isn’t going to fix a damn thing, I promise you).
Growing up with that has made me resolve that if I ever have kids, and if my kid ever comes home to say that some other kid beat them up, I am going straight to the police to file assault charges. Because — physical assault is a crime, right? And you go to the police when there’s a crime, right?
It’s honestly the only way I think it’d be taken seriously.
I was bullied at my first high school, but not at any of the other schools I attended. Sure, it upset me initially, I was’t used to people touching me and then wiping their hands on each other to ‘pass on Heather germs’, or forcing me to ingest what I thought was poison (which wasn’t), or throwing me off a 6 foot weir or pushing me off a desk chanting so that I split my head open on a window sill.
but seriously, it wasn’t that big of a deal, I had a full life and friends outside of school, I was skinnier and smarter and more charming than the silly girls, and school doesnt last forever. push a bitch into a fishpond here, slap another there, threaten to rape one with a ruler, yeah, that got me asked to leave!
I don’t get why people take it all so to heart. I know people who had councelling for a miniscule bit of pecking-order crap. One girl from that school I caged a ride off years later said “I can’t believe you didn’t cry. If you had shown you cared they would have left you alone.” I didn’t even noticed she was bullied, and she had had years of therapy!
If parents don’t give their kids other things to do outside of school then the kids think that the petty machinations of the classroom are real life. And I think some people ARE too thin skinned. If the kids are giving you a hard time go to the fricking library, read a book, shoot hoops, stab them with a pen, you don’t have to be part of the group to have fun.
I agree that bullying occurs partly because of being thin-skinned, but another big part I feel is being different. Kids pick up on that and then give you hard time. I’m so proud that some people while young have the courage to stand up to them and show the bullies that they do not fear them, as shared above, unfortunately I wasnt one of those people. And it is traumatic and it is horrible and you hate scool and getting up in the morning because of it. But again, as mentioned above, school doesn’t last forever. Hopefully you won’t be too messed up because of bullying and hopefully you will realise that the bullies themselves had their own insecurities and problems, and feel sorry for rather than angry at them. But some children can be so cruel, much worse than adults, and that scares me still. I suppose you just have to do your best when raising your children so they can fend for themselves and if it gets too much, make sure that the bullies are punished.
I think a bit of bullying is good for the soul – it toughens you up, stops you feeling quite so entitled and teaches you to sort out your problems yourself (My parents were horrified to discover I was bullied after I was kicked out. I didn’t tell them as a) I didnt want to upset them and b) It wasn’t really worth my time to talk about it when there were more fun things to focus on). Because there are SO MANY assholes in the workforce, not to mention asshole boyfriends etc, that unless you stop being a sooky little follower young, you are going to get left behind in the stampede, moaning about your poor wittle feelings while the other better ajusted people snag good jobs, good real estate and learn french cooking in their spare time. Its a jungle out there, not an episode of Thomas the Tank engine.
Which is not to say bullying is good. It isn’t. but a certain amount of power struggling and pecking order placement is a good learning curve, like baby lions fighting. And the ones who follow the bullies but don’t actively participate either way through fear? they will be stuck in middle management their whole lives, drive second rate cars snark about other peoples weight while being 10 pounds overweight themselves.
it is the media
… used 2 b all this was never seen because the was no global communication -
but now – everything everywhere is seen instantly throughout the universe at light seed …..
… i would guess there is less bullying – although i would say, from personal experience there is more –
..anonymous internet cowards ..
…so .. yeah – i guess there is more.
you choose to be bullied, by where u go and how you associate with ….
bullied at school – go to another school, don’t go to school
( which i highly recommend .. school is what society uses to bully people – the school is to blame – schools are bully factories, not the students, but the teachers/admin are the bullies – they let this stuff happen ,….. )
Just being curious: What does count as bullying? Does it already start with people calling you names?
There was a kid in school, 2 or 3 years above me, who would say I looked like a mop, because of my very curly short hair. Was I being bullied? Would that count? I do not want to mock the topic, I am just unsure about the definition.
Name calling is included, there are plenty of schools who would punish a student for that sort of thing now. Pretty much anything that could upset a precious little snowflake. One day my son wore a shirt with a monkey on the front to preschool and one of his friends said “hey monkey man!” His mom told him off and apologized to me. I told her it’s not big deal, they’re friends and it was both meant and taken as a reference to the shirt, but she said she had to set him straight so he wouldn’t grow up to be a bully. It’s really depressing. I remember one time a class mate told a black class mate that her hair looked like pubes. The girl in question laughed and said “yeah, it kinda does!” Then we had a discussion about hair and talked about the things we liked and hated about our hair. If someone said something like that nowadays and a teacher overheard they’d be looking at suspension most likely.
I was bullied during grade school and for part of middle school. They threw my backpack on the roof, pushed me so I’d fall in the mud, broke my glasses, cut me in line no matter what the line was for, hold things over my head so I couldn’t get them (I was really tiny as a kid…not too much bigger now though), among a whole host of other things. Then I went through my goth phase starting in 8th grade and I wore 5 inch platform boots with spikes on them and I didn’t get bullied that much anymore.
Jesus Christ… kid needs to grow a spine.
Just about everyone I know, even those that used to bully me, were bullied by someone else.
Never told my folks, never told the school authorities, I understood that it was my problem to deal with, and it got soundly dealt with. Dealing with it was part continuing to wear the flowery dresses I liked and part boxing lessons….
I am a little surprised at all these comments placing some blame on kids being too “thin-skinned” these days. During the last two years of high school I was relentlessly bullied by my own “friends,” who constantly picked at me. It was never physical, but the endless barrage of emotional and psychological abuse really wore on me. I went to a tiny private school, so I couldn’t really easily escape it. It got so bad that I developed an anxiety related eating disorder and contemplated suicide. I never told my parents about what was happening, but they definitely noticed a change in my behavior.
My life vastly improved once I graduated, and today I am well-adjusted and successful, although I am still recovering from my ED. Looking back on it now as an adult I realize that those girls were picking on me because of their own insecurities. I would never put up with that shit today, but back then I was just a kid. I wouldn’t call myself sensitive, but at that age I just didn’t have the emotional maturity to know how to deal with the bullying. Sure, school ends and you move on, but when you’re sixteen two years can seem like an eternity. With cell phones, texting, and the internet, bullying these days can consume so much of your life–it isn’t just limited to the playground. Even the toughest of people will eventually break under constant stress. I think it’s very unfair to call a victim of bullying “thin-skinned.” But hey, maybe I’m just being a delicate little flower.
Anon – it isn’t the kids we are finding fault with – it’s the parents.
I completely understand the overwhelming urge to protect your child from everything, but it has truly gotten out of hand.
These poor kids never get to fall because either the parent is right there to prop them up or catch them.
They learn nothing from this.
Sooner or later, they discover that the world is a hard, often cruel place. And they have no defenses against it because they were always shielded from life’s harsh realities.
This makes me think of that girl who killed herself about a month ago, I think it was somewhere on the east coast. I’m pretty sure that she wasn’t thin skinned, and that her parents didn’t coddle her. Unless being unable to deal with daily death threats from practically every stinking person in your douchey fucked up school is still thin-skinned. Being unable to deal with someone calling you a name a couple of times is definitely thin skinned; being stalked physically and via text message and internet, threatened constantly by everyone you know, and ignored by the people you ask for help is not.
I completely agree. I don’t think this increase in news stories about kids committing suicide or being hospitalized as a result of bullying has anything to do with ~recent generations~ being coddled. I can say that my parents certainly never coddled me, nor was I ever a “wimp.” I think it has much more to do with the internet/cellular age. Like I said, you can’t just leave school and escape bullies any longer. I was tormented by these girls even when I was home. This wasn’t some kid pushing me on the playground or making fun of my hair at the lunch table–I sat with these girls in every class five days a week, and then endured their abuse at home after school and on weekends. And these girls told me they were my friends. I wasn’t stupid, I was just so worn down I didn’t know what to do.
Was vomiting six times a day from anxiety supposed to teach me a lesson about picking myself up and dusting myself off? Surely I could learn how to solve problems and how to be strong and independent without spending the next six years learning to eat food like a normal person again. I have no doubt that the world is a cruel place and I would never pretend to my own children that it wasn’t, but I don’t think kids should ever, ever have to experience this sort of systematic abuse. If anything, I think parents should be more involved in their children’s lives–or at least more aware. I never said a word about my own experience to my parents until I was in college, and it destroyed my mother to know that she hadn’t done anything to help. There are some situations that children simply cannot figure out on their own, especially when they already feel so isolated and alone as a result of this kind of bullying.
Good grief LOADS of people get death threats etc at school. Unless they ACTUALLY KILL YOU, which clearly they havent or ZL has become some kind of ouija board, a death threat isn’t worth the air it is uttered with.
Of course people shouldn’t be mean to each other, and in an ideal world they are not, but guess what honey, it ISN’T an ideal world and no-one spends more than seconds thinking about people other then themselves and their loved ones at a time.
Now, it sucks you had an eating disorder, and all power to you for being a survivor rather than a victim. i mean that. Survivors are like a darwinian orgasm. But you didn’t get the eating disorder from anyone else but yourself, and you gave yourself permission to symptomise your anxiety that way.
In the same ways, bullies do not make others commit suicide.
My ex husband was para-suicidal, which meant that every couple of days he would pretend to try to commit suicide because he was addicted to the drama. Now he had LOTS of therapy that I also had to endure, and one of the first things I was upset about was that he was always blaming my actions on his ‘suicidal’ impulses. And mind you, at this point the doctor, our families and myself thought he WAS going to kill himself. It took a few years for us to realise he wasn’t. So I tearfully told the doctor how terrified I was that I would make him kill himself. And the doctor said ‘No-one. NO ONE can make someone else kill themselves. If they do, they wanted to do it all along.’”
If threats, physical violence, exclusion etc were going to make people kill themselves, I would have so many gravestones my house would be boot hill.
These poor kids who kill themselves, the problem runs far, far deeper than school and bullying.
And on the whole, people need to toughen up. not just kids. people.
Death threats are normal??
Holy fuck, either I have really tame standards of normal due to my Montana schooling or yours are really out there.
I think it is very much a group dynamic thing – one highschool death threats floated like lillypads on a fish pond, the other, people would bake cupcakes for the whole class. You only need one sociopathic kid, or one really stressed kid to create a terrible dynamic.
And to add to that, in retrospect I am glad I had the four year experience of being bullied, because by nature I am somewhat of a bully myself and it taught me compassion. After my experience I resoved not to let the fact I am more confident than your average armed marine mean that I can walk all over weaker people who are not articulate enough to take me on.
However. If anyone is out of school and still smarting from being bullied, you need councelling. Which is not a put down, just a statement. Noone should be a victim 5 minutes longer than they need to.
I completely respect your opinion that no one should let themselves be a victim. I even support it. But do you really think that those kids who bullied those other children so much that they killed themselves to escape it are completely blameless? My point is that at 15 or 16 years old (and certainly younger), a lot of kids just don’t have the emotional maturity or know how to deal with these daily attacks. I think a lot of adults would struggle with it. I’m sure that if you were getting death threats multiple times a day for weeks on end, you might be a little stressed. Now, I wish I had had the outstanding confidence that you did when I was that age, but I didn’t. But I also wasn’t some moody social outcast–I was bright, outgoing, and a good student. I didn’t have suicidal tendencies or suffer from depression until I was bullied. From what I read, a lot of these bullying victims were the same–just average kids. I very much doubt that they would commit suicide or suffer adverse health were they not subjected to bullying.
You’re completely right that this goes deeper than bullying, however. I would love to figure out what makes kids decide to pull this bullshit, because it needs to stop. But saying that everyone, including children, need to toughen up isn’t going far enough.
Of course I don’t think bullying is justified, or positive. But I think it is a natural part of the growing experience and that peoples extreme reactions to it are due to other factors, not the bullying, though of course it compounds it.
you could get three people, subject them to the same bullying, one would become depressed, one wouldnt care, and the other would become a bully themselves.
When my daughter gets bullied at school, and I am assuming she will because the only people who don’t seem to be the invisible introverts or the psycopaths, I trust that she will sort it out herself, because those are the lifeskills I will give her.
you should read the books ‘queen bees and wannabes’ and ‘odd girl out’. But you seem to still be holding on to the experience with some pain, so maybe you should think about whether or not you are using it to define you and feel a little sorry for yourself. Because until you can see every experience for the positive light that it has shed on your life you are feeling sorry for yourself. And you should toughen up.
Any pain I still experience from my own bullying only comes when I read about these kids. I do, in fact, look back on my experience and realize that it has made me stronger. I’m not sitting around moping in my house, lamenting my lost high school years. I brought up the fact of my own experience because it was pertinent to this particular post. I was attempting to further illustrate how serious the effects of bullying can be, not garner sympathy or have a pity party. I was bullied, it sucked, but I carried on with my life. I’m happy, I have a great job, and a wonderful SO. The fact is, some of these kids aren’t so lucky. There’s bullying, and then there’s *bullying.* I honestly can barely call some of this shit I read about bullying–it’s too light a word, and I don’t think this behavior should be so easily brushed aside. But I forgot that I was delicate and fragile. I’ll go grow a pair of steel balls and then get back to you.
I am glad. And even gladder that you bared your teeth a little, even if it is at the nice internet lady who stayed up until 2am when the rest of her family is asleep because she genuinely cared!
A victim wouldn’t have done that.
Now I am going to go put my shining armour and white steed away for the night and get some rest to fight more injustice tomorrow!
HEY!!! I am not a psychopath (I hope) nor was I an invisible introvert in fact in middle school I was downright popular (I went to probably a total of 6months of high school over the course of three years) but even then I had a couple close friends (what I view as close, I’ve always been described by other people as a happy loner) and I was never bullied nor was I ever a bully I’d be sad if someone thought I was a bully though I can’t remember ever doing anything cruel so they were wienies if they do.
On a more important topic I came back to this to basically say what you said about about no bully is to blame for the suicides of these kids, I honestly believe the ones that kill themselves over it are the same ones that kill themselves because of stressful jobs, or when a friend is hurt, or when they get a divorce basically when they finally have something to stress over if not in high school, then later.
About the constant cell phone calls and text harassment, well block a number or even better don’t give out your goddamn number to every tom, dick, and harry. If they do so on a social website, block their asses, through email block their asses or don’t give them your email address. Leave school behind, it IS still easy to do if you just use a little common sense.
Sure, but kids these days don’t want to be shut off. They have a chance to be connected with their friends at all times, which is considered normal. It just opens them up to bullying as well.
It’s like eating your lunch in the bathroom in school. You can shut yourself off and get away from the other kids, but you lose out on things you want too.
It’s like a lot of things that bring both good and bad.
I was never outright bullied, and I’m thankful for that. Everyone says it will “toughen you up”, but I ended up pretty damn tough without it.
I think that there are some more extreme cases of bullying these days than there might have been a generation ago. I blame the constantly connected culture, and the kid-consumerism of society for that.
But I think that the definition of bullying has also expanded so far that a lot of bullying is silly, and the kids should get over it. In a lot of schools these days, to call another kid a name is grounds for a three-day suspension. That’s ridiculous, and kids getting all bent out of shape for little issues is where I blame overprotective parents that left their child unable to fend for himself in anything.
Two separate issues. If you experienced the former, I’m not trying to suggest it wasn’t real.
As for death threats, I remember telling a friend in junior high “I’m going to kill you if we’re late now” (or something equally random and joking), and being informed by some random person nearby that uttering death threats was a serious crime.
I’m sure something like that would be grounds for expulsion these days. And it’s that kind of thing that is stupid.
Honestly I don’t think people are any more or less mean than they have been in years past, nor do I agree that children have thinner skins per se (people have had varying degrees of tolerance for bullying for generations).
I honestly think, for better or worse, it’s because the world is so tightly networked now. Used to be you’d get home from school and you could avoid your tormentors. Now they’re sending you texts, spamming your Facebook, bombarding you with messages, tweeting about you, and generally getting all up in your life. That kind of torment 24/7 would get to a person.
THIS IS SO SAID! WE WANT TO HELP STOP BULLYING! WE’VE UNITED SOME OF THE BIGGEST CELEBS IN HOLLYWOOD TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT BULLYING, TELL THERE STORIES AS VICTIMS & MORE. RayJ, Brandy, Tatyana Ali, Quinton Aaron, Kym Whitley, event TI’s Coming Aboard.
HELP RESOURCES ARE HERE TOO! PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO ALL YOU KNOW AFFECTED BY BULLYING.
Yep, that list definitely sounds like the biggest celebs in Hollywood. How ‘said’
Stop yelling and stop spamming.
The story about a Foxboro girl making calls to this little girl was all a scam. The parents acknowledged this at http://www.foxbororeporter.com.
Hope someone is accountable ! I was going to call over … but feared that it may send the family to the emergency room again :)
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