Indifference to Bullying

After a bit of a summer break, I returned to see this chestnut in the headlines: Openly gay teen sues Mohawk school district, Claims leaders' indifference failed to stop ongoing abuse. Since we read all the time about how schools cause more problems than they solve by being absurdly reactionary or just downright irrational, a story about a school not doing enough to prevent a crisis seems like a rare thing these days.

Readers will remember it wasn't too long ago that the story of the Springfield boy who committed suicide due to the school's indifference toward the severe bullying he'd been suffering with dropped a similar feel as this one. On the same occasion, we also heard of the middle school that sought to prevent bullying by banning all touch whether good or bad. Why does it seem that some schools either deal with bullying with an all or nothing approach?

We know all schools have to deal with bullying, that not every case of bullying a school is dealing with winds up in the news (and not everything in the news is true), and that on the whole schools do an adequate and reasonable job preventing unthinkable crises from escalating. It's really about doing what is adequate (as in, doing enough to protect victims of harassment in schools), while still remaining in the realm of what is reasonable (as in, not throwing down overly simple solutions--like banning all touch). But in these individual cases, sometimes you just have to wonder whether they are erring too far one way or the other.

He’d been picked on in seventh grade for not acting or looking “how a boy should look.” Students threw food at him, called him names, broke his cell phone and iPod, and constantly hurled names his way. Last year was worse.

“I had a hard time concentrating at school because I was constantly being harassed,” the teen said in an interview Wednesday. While all this was happening, Jacob and his parents say, Mohawk Central School District officials did nothing.

Due to the fact that the student is openly homosexual, there's always going to be the possibility that the school, for some reason, didn't count harassment on the basis of sexual orientation (something young people don't legally have) as actual harassment, or was for any reason of opinion willfully ignorant to it. The lawsuit goes on to describe various incidents of complaints made by the student and his family that the high school principal repeatedly took no action on, it also describes how a teacher explicitly on a number of occasions made the student's sexual orientation the subject of ridicule and humiliation.

Those who are implicated--the school, the principal, and the teacher--all deny these charges. If it is the case here that the school knowingly ignored his complaints of harassment on the basis of his sexual orientation, then that is one issue. If they knowingly ignored his complaints simply because that's their policy, then they're just not doing what is adequate. And if such is the case, let's hope they don't throw themselves too far in the opposite, unreasonable, direction as a response.