bullying

I have a confession to make.........I was a bully in grade school. oh yea, and maybe a tinnnnnny bit in middle school too. I was huge into professional "wrestling" and because I was bigger than most kids I felt obligated to try to put them in a sleeper hold or perfect my figure four leg lock on them. It was really more in the spirit of "playing" with friends than hard core hateful bullying for the sake of being mean, but I'm sure there were some times it got out of hand.

I ran across this article about a school in ohio that has had four suicides allegedly in response to bullying. (I say allegedly because as much as I hate bullying and believe it could easily lead to suicide, you never know if there are other factors like untreated depression or family history that could also play a part) The story of brutal attacks endured by a young girl whose family moved here from Croatia literally made me cry. I've included an excerpt from an ap article about the incident here........

"Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.

“Nonstop smile. Nonstop music,” says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.

At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like “Slutty Jana” or “Slut-Jana-Vagina.” A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.

Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she’d be dead in the morning, that they’d find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.

“Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped,” says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. “Because she couldn’t handle it. She didn’t have enough strength.”

Vidovic’s parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her............

Sladjana Vidovic’s body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.

The 16-year-old’s last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like “Slutty Jana” and threw food at her.

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died at his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

Now two families — including the Vidovics — are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it.

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the “100 Best Places to Live” by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana’s family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister’s body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket — and laughed.

“They were laughing at the way she looked,” Suzana says, crying. “Even though she died.”---------


Has human life really been so devalued that people could seriously laugh at a young person who took her own life? Has "the love of many grown cold" to this level?

My opinion is that extreme cases like this are not merely a symptom of kids being kids, but a reflection of the moral decay of our society.

Here is my two cents,

Cent # 1. Although bullying has always existed, the ability to engage in character assassination using things like social networks and websites designed specifically to attack individuals, lets the torment continue 24/7 and also allows for a level of anonymity.

cent #2---I can't help but believe that we are creating an environment in our culture where this is becoming acceptable. we have turned public humiliation into entertainment and kids watch HOURS of programming (even on "family friendly" channels" where they are schooled in how to be cruel and rude under the guise of family entertainment.

I'm not trying to be anti technology and I'm not saying we can raise kids in a bubble, but I pray by the grace of God that a generation of Jesus Followers is raised up who will recognize this for the evil that it is, and let Philippians 2:3-4 be their standard!!!

Do you think bullying is worse now than when you were young or am I way off here? I'd love to hear your thoughts or bully stories.