School Violence Begs Discussion About Bullying

By Darien Bates

On Monday the American school system was dealt another blow, when Jeff Weise, a high school student in Red Lake, Minnesota entered his school with a gun, killing seven before ending his own life, following a brief shootout with police. The rampage was the most devastating school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado killed 13 and wounded 23 before committing suicide in 1999.

Though particularly bloody, Monday's attack is just another in a string of shootings, that while not commonplace, have occurred with disturbing regularity over the past eight years.

Already, the national media has begun to search for the causes behind the most recent incident, noting Weise’s comments about Adolf Hitler, his assumed Internet name Totesengel, German for "angel of death," and his father’s suicide. The questions of motive are strikingly similar to those following the Columbine shootings that focused on poor parenting and violent pop-culture influence.

And just like in Colorado, as the conversations continue, more and more people have started to mention his social ostracism, the extent to which the shootings could have been provoked by bullying from fellow students, and preventative action that could have been taken.

But to understand how bullying could possibly lead to the disasters in Littleton and Red Lake, as well as the many others over the past decade, it is necessary to reevaluate the common perception of bullying.

Dr. Ted Feinberg, assistant executive director at the National Association of School Psychologists, said that most people think of bullying as being a part of growing up. “People think of it as a rite of passage, that everyone goes through it,” Feinberg said. “It was a character building life experience.”

But he said that bullying is hardly a harmless activity, consisting of a little hair-pulling on school yards, and stolen lunch money. He said the constant intimidation and threats can cause psychological and even physiological harm to children and adolescents that could last a lifetime.

In conversations with adults, Feinberg is constantly told how after 30 or 40 years, they can still remember the bullying they lived through as children, the experiences etched permanently into their memories.

“These things don’t just happen and fade,” Feinberg said.

It’s not always easy to define the causes of bullying. Sometimes family problems lead kids to become bullies, other times it is prior bullying that leads to the activity.

Feinberg said that one of the biggest causes, though, is the structure of the school system that often increases disparities between students and marginalizes certain members of the population.

Lobbying for a bill in front of the U.S. House of Representatives, Virginia Bully Police executive director and Miss Virginia contestant Adrianna Sgarlata has made the prevention of bullying a top priority. (Photo courtesy Bully Police)

In high school where athletics often has a huge following from students and parents, participants and especially stars of sports teams gain an amount of respect and even preferable treatment. Meanwhile, those who are unable to compete in this system are left out.

Feinberg said that these students often become the target for bullies.

“Kids have a remarkable capacity to pick out the kids with the big “V” (for victim) on their foreheads,” he said. “Any community that places undo admiration and support on one thing, sets apart others who feel excluded. The question is, what are we doing to bolster their self-esteem and highlight their self-worth?”

Feinberg said, without this focus on helping victims bullied students are more likely to not only be tortured, but also feel little power to resist and report those who abuse them.

While bullying is most common in elementary schools and gradually lessens as students age, reflecting a natural progression in maturity levels, Feinberg said the bullying at the high school level can be more damaging and often more difficult to spot. At the high school level, bullies often use sophisticated emotional teasing and intimidation, possibly more destructive in the long term than simple physical bullying.

He added the growth of the Internet has made the abuse even harder to find and enforce. E-mail and web posting allows bullies to reach an even larger audience, and the ability to create multiple, nameless e-mail accounts makes it difficult to trace back to a specific person.

Feinberg acknowledged that bullying has long been a part of school culture, but the need to do something about bullying has become more urgent in recent years. “The degree of lethality is much more dramatic than it used to be,” he said. Bullies have started using more and more dangerous methods, and the backlash by those who have been pushed to the limits has become devastating, evidenced by the growing number of school shootings.

He argued that the increasingly violent attitude among students is heavily influenced by a culture that promotes violence. He said by the time the average kid is 16 he has already witnessed 250,000 depictions of violence through TV and film. “Even a freshman psych student knows that you don’t need 250,000 sessions to learn a behavior,” he said.

While the occasional violent response to bullying makes national headlines, suicides are a more common response by students who have been bullied.

Studies have shown that intense bullying often leads to depression, a leading cause of suicide. Over the past three decades suicide rates among adolescents have tripled to the point where today, every two hours an American youth commits suicide.

Even with an increased motivation to prevent bullying, tracking it can be very difficult. Feinberg said that from an early age students are told to take care of their own problems and not to be tattle-tales. They come to believe that they can’t come to teachers or parents for help in conflicts between students.

“We have to try and break down the conspiracy of silence,” Feinberg said. “Right now students feel that to tell authority [about a bully] is to snitch, to rat, to squeal.”

To overcome this ingrained resistance, Feinberg said that it is essential to institute policies that take seriously anybody who reports threatening activity and also recognizes that bullies are not just perpetrators but also often victims of bullying themselves.

“We have to make sure that codes of conducts are implemented,” he said.

Brenda High has made it her personal mission that schools across the country are doing just that. The founder of Bully Police, a nationwide organization dedicated to preventing bullying, High was pushed to do something about bullying in 1998 after her own son, Jared, 13, committed suicide following intense abuse by a fellow student, well known to be a bully.

Despite her warnings to the school’s administration about the bullying, nothing was done to stem the problem. Jared became depressed and detached, finally shooting himself, rather than continue to face the daily torture.

Brenda and her husband sued the school, saying they didn’t do enough to prevent the abuse. During the lawsuit, their lawyers discovered there was a lack of research on the subject of bullying.

Realizing that, High made it her crusade to do everything she could about educating communities about the effects of bullying and promoting the creation of legislation to combat the problem.

Using a Norwegian study on school bullying, and information from the 2000 census, she determined a ballpark figure about the number of students being bullied and those doing the bullying. According to her estimates over four million students are bullied in the U.S. and another four million bullies, figures she says are decidedly low, as rates of bullying have risen since the study was conducted.

After starting Bully Police, High discovered that few states had any kind of preventative measures against bullying. Since then High has lobbied for new laws in several states, and on her website she has graded all the states on the strength and effectiveness of their anti-bullying legislation, which she gives letter grades.

“If educators can grade our kids, we can certainly grade their laws,” said High.

She said that there are crucial parts to any legislation designed to prevent bullying, the first of which is to clearly label the problem as bullying. In California, the legislation that was meant to combat abusive behavior in schools labeled bullying as a hate crime, something that High said is laughable. “No kid is going to understand that,” she said. “The kids are going to laugh.”

The other important part of the law is that it does something for the victims, and doesn’t simply punish the bully. She said it is important that a victim understands that they were a victim of bullying and that they have a right not to be.

As far as the bully, she said that 9 out of 10 times, simply making the bully aware of the actual damage the he or she is doing will stop the action. For those who continue after being confronted with their actions, High said it is necessary that punitive actions be taken immediately and with consistency.

The lack of consistent action in the past is often what makes students unwilling to report bullying, feeling nothing will be done about it.

In February, Virginia saw its own form of bully legislation get passed by the legislature, spurred on by the Virginia branch of Bully Police.

Leading the charge was Adrianna Sgarlata, director of Bully Police Virginia and a candidate for Miss Virginia.

Sgarlata said that she took over the issue of bullying because of her own memories of being bullied as a young kid in middle school.

With assistance from High, Sgarlata contacted Delegate Rob Bell, who had tried in the past to pass similar legislation. Bell was excited about the idea and worked to craft the necessary legislation.

While he put together the bills, it was up to Sgarlata to get support behind it. Through e-mail, phone, and personal meetings she was able to get near unanimous support, with only two votes against, throughout the entire approval process.

The law, House Bill 2266, attempts to establish character education programs within all Virginia schools, as part of the daily curriculum, with a specific focus on bullying. The addition is meant to both establish specific classes, and be integrated into school procedures and environment.

Along with teaching proper behavior, the law mandates that teachers report misconduct to principals and superintendents, and also that schools and law enforcement share information about students when behavioral problems warrant.

Still, the effectiveness of the law will depend entirely on whether the new rules can be implemented.

Dr. Gloria Guba, assistant superintendent for Falls Church City schools said the City’s school system regularly evaluates its policies and the new legislation would likely cause alterations to the school’s present behavioral codes and enforcement policy.

While the description of character education for Falls Church schools doesn’t specifically mention bullying, it states the intention of the program is to “educate students regarding those core civic values and virtues which are efficacious to civilized society and are common to the diverse social, cultural, and religious groups of the commonwealth.”

As far as enforcement policy, bullying is grouped in with gang activity, in the Falls Church enforcement guide.

Guba said that while they are aware of the occasional incident they haven’t seen it consistently. “We’ve had instances or situations in the past but I wouldn’t say it’s a major problem in any of the schools,” she said.

Still the answers to the questions raised by the steady succession of school shooters might be bigger than simple rule changes.

The Round House Theatre in Silver Spring recently opened its production of "Columbinus," a play that struggles to deal with the Colorado school shooting over five years later. Despite the water that has passed under the bridge since that day, the facts that have been clarified and all the questions that have been asked, the complexity of the problems and the lack of any simple solution remains.

As the actors stand before a simple chalk board and write down the names of those slain, one wonders; would they still be alive if the rules had been tighter? If the teachers had been required to report the bullying that Eric and Dylan faced daily? Is bullying preventable?

For the sake of all the children that must pass through the halls of America’s schools in the years ahead, the effort is growing to make the answer yes.