• Parents say ‘relentless bullying,’ Facebook posts, led to 14-year-old’s suicide
    78 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Firecat;50214746]Too much work for them. Why do you think no tolerance policies are also in affect at a lot of schools. It's sad, but it's much harder for them to figure out who did what than just send them home with the same punishment when one was probably just trying to defend himself.[/QUOTE] It's not just the zero-tolerance policies that suck, their whole attitude sucks here in the United States. Teachers and administrators basically expect kids to sort it out themselves 90% of the time, and they refuse to intervene like adults are supposed to when, you know, the kids they're in charge of are out of line. Timmy constantly picks on Billy? "Well now Timmy, that's not very nice. You go apologize to Billy at once, shake hands, and let that be the end of it." Never fucking happens, and they never lay down the law either on the one causing the problem. Or the kid at worst gets sent to the office, sent home for the rest of the day and maybe a few extra days, then comes back and the whole process repeats itself. And if you try and stand up for yourself physically, as others have pointed out, well then you're fucked right along with the person that was harassing you and/or assaulting you. On the one hand, yeah, we have a lot of stupid policies that basically also tie their hands behind their backs to the point where they can't do anything even if they wanted to-- so that is an issue. On the other hand, it's also just a matter of a lot of them simply not wanting to do their jobs properly and keep the peace like they used to have to 50+ years ago. And the problem is also with kids as well. They're terrible. I was talking with my friend's mom the other day who teaches third graders and has been in the profession for 23 years this coming August, and she swears up and down that kids genuinely are worse today than they used to be. It's not just old people ranting about them, it's an honest situation of where they have no shame, no standards, and aren't held accountable the way that they used to be-- not by school faculty, and especially not by their parents. The system as a whole sucks and needs to be completely scrapped and re-evaluated. We're doing something wrong here. I mean, bullying has always been a thing and always will be, and humans are basically built to behave like massive faggots towards each other, but there's a lot wrong otherwise putting those issues aside. Whether we're talking with zero-tolerance policies, the lack of student accountability, the inability or the lack of willingness for faculty to intervene, etc., this whole mess is not working as it should be. It's barely chugging itself along, and even then it's going at an extremely dysfunctional pace.
[QUOTE=sam6420;50215699]I never played sports but I hardly think they're the problem. I'm not American so I really can't argue, I just feel like blaming sports is a knee-jerk reaction.[/QUOTE] I have two stories from my school. First, a football team member brought a weapon to a school(brass knuckles) and threatened to beat someone up with it. He got away because, he was on the football team. Then that same person threatened to beat someone up outside class, and in the hall, lo and behold he did. The person he beat up got suspended(???) and he got away free because yes, he was on the football team. Needless to say the police in my town didn't care and the judges here are incredibly biased. So no legal recourse could happen unless someone was willing to fork out the exorbitant amounts of money to pay for a proper lawyer. [editline]29th April 2016[/editline] Hell, the truancy officers(see: sheriff) came and threatened my parents because I went to the doctor for a heart problem. I had only missed 2 days of school but they said we'd go to court if I missed another.
[QUOTE=RenegadeCop;50215688]Or reorganize the priorities of a national school system? Fuck sports, honestly.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=sam6420;50215699]I never played sports but I hardly think they're the problem. I'm not American so I really can't argue, I just feel like blaming sports is a knee-jerk reaction.[/QUOTE] There's nothing inherently wrong with sports, I played football in high school and it was a positive experience for me as one of the nerdy outcasts. However, the emphasis schools place on sports over education and the well-being of their students is absolutely disgusting, and this happens both at a college and a high school level. When you have stories like a college [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Sandusky]covering up sexual abuse of children[/url] because exposing that their football coach is a pedophile could hurt their football team, or high schools allocating funding to new sporting equipment while their teachers are underequipped and understaffed, it's clear that the priorities are completely wrong. Sports aren't the problem, how schools treat sports and athletes is.
[QUOTE=Taepodong-2;50215169]Not all bullies are physical. When I was in grade 5 I went to a new school and from the first day the one black kid in my class started bullying me for no reason. Being super racist, calling me a cracker and telling me to get a tan and shit. And then eventually it escalated to the point where he was physically attacking me whenever he got the opportunity. [B]And that's when I stopped being a good student who loved going to school and got good grades in everything and became a not so good student with average grades and hating school.[/B][/QUOTE] Similiar situation was with me, in elementary school i used to have good grades and be good student till i started getting bullied, after 3 years of bullying i avoided school, was afraid of it and my grades fallen greatly. And since then my grades been always low :cry:
I think it is so important for those kids to be able to open up to their parents about their suicidal tendencies. That way, they are more likely to receive treatment, and be able to get on the mend. Therefore, lives will be saved and the suicide rate of teenages/kids would go down. I know this isn't an easy fix, but it's the way forward.
Used to get bullied in middle school and guess what. Never got helped and everything got sweeped under the sheets. That's seriously fucked up if school doesn't even react. (I'm 22, can't tell if my mental state is better now, I don't really have friends, except online ones. Not really stable either.) Cyber bullying is the worst thing possible. People usually tend to ignore it, since "it's just internet, you can quit any time" when it really isn't... that easy. I really hope people will get aware of the problems and thinking will change soon.
[QUOTE=GisG56;50233488]I think it is so important for those kids to be able to open up to their parents about their suicidal tendencies. That way, they are more likely to receive treatment, and be able to get on the mend. Therefore, lives will be saved and the suicide rate of teenages/kids would go down. I know this isn't an easy fix, but it's the way forward.[/QUOTE] You've never been in this kind of situation have you?
Playing sports in high school got me way more friends than I would have had otherwise and taught me a lot about how much I can push myself when I want to. It was an extremely valuable part of my total experience, probably more so than some of my classes.
[QUOTE=Smug Bastard;50235393]You've never been in this kind of situation have you?[/QUOTE] Do you mean as a parent? I don't have any kids aha
I went through some pretty horrible bullying in high school, im so grateful the current social media culture was still in it's infancy back then, or im 100% sure it would have been so much worse. The closest thing to cyber-bullying that ever happened to me was having pictures of my profile picture printed out and put up around my school with captions about how people should assault me because I was gay ( Im bisexual but i guess that's not as funny to morons?). A few years later I learned from my girlfriend that the posters had actually been put up around her school as well, along with several other high schools that her friends attended. I Used to get forced into fights with gangs of kids, in and out of school, shouting my name and homophobic slurs when I didn't even know who the fuck they were, I Can't imagine how far that shit could have gone with the help of some dedicated social media shit-flinging.
[QUOTE='[Sage] Cblt;50234090']Used to get bullied in middle school and guess what. Never got helped and everything got sweeped under the sheets. That's seriously fucked up if school doesn't even react. (I'm 22, can't tell if my mental state is better now, I don't really have friends, except online ones. Not really stable either.) Cyber bullying is the worst thing possible. People usually tend to ignore it, since "it's just internet, you can quit any time" when it really isn't... that easy. I really hope people will get aware of the problems and thinking will change soon.[/QUOTE] You don't even need to be on the internet to be cyber bullied. Even if you're offline cyber bullying happens through malicious misinformation spread by bullies through social media, helping them build a barrier between their victim and any potential friends they might have. Cyber bullying is a hell of a lot more then just getting called a shithead through Facebook messenger.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.