From Peter Gray's 'Freedom to Learn' blog

Antibullying laws will work only when students make the laws.

Let's say you are 15 years old, or 13, or 11, and for some reason–a reason over which you have no control–you have been singled out by your schoolmates as an object for scorn and humiliation. Every day at school, for you, is another day in hell. You are called "whore," "bitch," "slut;" or "fag," "pussy," "scum;" or worse. People deliberately bump into you and knock your books out of your hands in the hallway. Nobody sits with you at lunch, or, if they do, those people are harassed until they stop sitting with you. These bullies are not the brutish looking comic-strip bullies, whom nobody likes and who steal other kids' lunch money. No, these bullies are among the popular kids–the athletes, cheerleaders, preppies. They are popular not just with most of the other kids but also with the teachers, school administrators, and adults in the larger community.

The law requires that you attend school, regardless of how you feel about it and how you are treated. You are not one of the privileged minority whose parents have the means to send them to a private alternative school or to convince the  school board that they can educate them adequately at home. You have no choice.

What do you do? If you are like most of the hundreds of thousands of picked-on kids who suffer like this every day you somehow suck it up. You harden yourself and somehow survive it. You may be the only person who will ever know the full extent of your suffering. You may think about killing yourself; you may even fantasize some violent revenge against the whole school, as the whole school seems to be your enemy. If you are like most kids such thoughts remain in the realm of fantasy. But every once in a while, in a particularly vulnerable person, the despair or rage or both erupt into violence, either against the self or against the whole school, and only then does school bullying become an issue to the larger community.

Here's how Helen Smith, in her book The Scarred Heart, tells one such story, that of the suicide of 13-year-old April Michelle Himes of Richland, Washington: "Kids at school called her fat, threw things at her and pushed her around. They ridiculed her with rumors that she stuffed tissues in her bra. She attempted suicide and her parents admitted her to an inpatient mental hospital program and sought counseling but said it didn't help. After missing fifty-three out of the required one hundred and eighty days of school, she was told that she would have to return to school or appear before a truancy board which could then send her to a juvenile detention center. She decided the better alternative was to go into her bedroom and hang herself with a belt. … In times past, she could have just dropped out of school, but now kids like her are trapped by compulsory education."

In my home state of Massachusetts we've been hearing a lot recently about school bullying and suicide. A year ago, headlines were made when 11-year-old Charles Joseph Walker-Hoover hanged himself rather than face another day of bullying at the supposedly "good" charter school he attended in Springfield. Then, in January of this year, Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old immigrant from Ireland, hanged herself after months of bullying by students at the public school she attended in the affluent community of South Hadley.

The outrage that followed Prince's suicide, coming so soon after Walker-Hoover's, forced the hands of the Massachusetts legislature. Just last week they passed, unanimously, an anti-bullying bill that was then immediately signed into law by the governor. The whole state felt that something had to be done, so that Charles's and Phoebe's deaths would not have been in vain. So they created a law.


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