It seems you can’t be too careful these days. We walk around with our heads down, looking around furtively for anyone who might steal our purse, our identity, our children. Nothing and nobody is safe.
We’re dealing with terrorism, rape, domestic abuse, corporate crime, global warming and a slew of other dangers. The latest? Bullies.
Anymore, even the schoolyard is a place full of scheming, devious teenagers capable of leading a 15-year-old girl to suicide back in January.
Who are these kids who are so capable of making one innocent person’s life miserable—and where does it go from here?
We would all like to believe that there truly is no danger; that these events are just rare anomalies in a sea of nice, normal, sensitive children.
We would like to believe sending the kids out to recess doesn’t mean they’ll be in harm’s way. But it’s not really possible to believe that anymore.
Consider Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old mentioned above, who committed suicide after a slew of classmates bullied her incessantly.
Consider Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, who took his own life last year after repeatedly being called “gay” and “faggot.”
In 1998 and 2000, respectively, Jared High and April Himes committed suicide as a result of severe bullying.
Nearly everyone has been the victim of bullying at some point in their lives—whether in school, at home, or even at work. Only now, though, are we beginning to recognize it as a serious problem.
Once, bullying would have been considered by some as almost a rite of passage; something everyone has to go through at some point or another.
“Toughen up,” we might have been told, “It’s good for you.” Maybe we were told to fight back, or that simply alerting someone in authority would solve the problem.
Apparently, things are worse than we thought.
Of course, not all bullies are malicious enough to invoke suicide, but the entire image of a bully seems to have changed.
A bully is no longer a large, lurking dope who steals your lunch money and is easily handled with a warning from the school principal.
A bully could be anyone: the otherwise shy, studious boy who terrorizes his peers online; the pretty, popular cheerleader who makes life misery for the less popular girls; the fraternity brother who hazes freshmen in unthinkable, humiliating ways; the coworker who treats the rookie employee like dirt.
What happened to Phoebe Prince and others like her never should have happened.
But perhaps, because of them, the rest of us are waking up to the fact that a bully can be more than a schoolyard menace.
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