The Diane Rehm Show

My father worked as a speech and language pathologist in the public school system for more than four decades. I find myself relying on his experience in this matter. He once told me that he considered bullying behavior to be a primitive behavior which will probably follow humanity through its history, but despite its ubiquitous nature, can never be tolerated.

One issue is in detecting and identifying the behavior. So much of this behavior goes on out of sight of adult authority figures. Often when it does happen in the open, as your guests pointed out, it is misidentified as conflict, or its seriousness is not recognized.

There are many things that must be done to combat this behavior, but I believe there are several things which are within our reach now. 1) Children must know from the day they enter school as a young child, that this behavior will not be tolerated and will be responded to with swift and serious consequences. 2) Schools need to place much closer monitoring on students. A lot of this behavior takes place in locker rooms and gymnasiums. These locations should be under constant surveillance. 3) Students who bully and are of sufficient age to be charged with felonies as an adult, must be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Their parents should have their parental rights revoked and forced to pay restitution to the bullied child and his/her family.

I would like to additionally note, that the current political climate in our nation is actually encouraging bullying. A faction of politicians actually attempted to legalize bullying in one recent case (by amending a law to allow bullying where it was based upon "moral convictions"). The intent of this amendment was to actually protect bullying behavior against individuals such as the young person on the show today under the guise of religious freedom! We are electing bullies to office, who later fight to allow bullying to continue!

As other commenters have mentioned, the legal tools often exist, but are not utilized. It is not in the interest of a school administrator to have large amounts of students arrested at their school, during their tenure. Administrators simply want the problem to go away. For them, the easiest way is to let your child be bullied until he or she graduates. Students need to have advocates. I applaud the doctor and the film maker for taking on this issue, but they are merely the beginning. Our children are the most neglected part of our society and we need to do better, or our future will continue to suffer.

It's really sad when a teacher stands up to bullying in the classroom, only to be overruled by a principal who caves in to a bully's parents' demands about how their child must be accommodated rather than held accountable. Parents of the victims of bullying never know what has happened to their children, but the principal and district administrators can say there's no bullying problem in that school!

Gilbert Public Schools (Arizona) is firing an acclaimed National Board Certified Teacher after she reported bullying, racial discrimination and retaliation. She has become a poster child for what happens to teachers who report bullying in the classroom. The teacher is pretty, but the poster is ugly. www.WesternConnections.com

The teacher reported bullying in her third grade classroom at Meridian Elementary School in February 2011, where she taught for six years. The teacher worked diligently to resolve the problems she reported internally and informally. The situation was dire: at least one student was afraid to come to school for fear of the bully. No one at the district level helped the students who were victims of bullying. The district instead commissioned investigations that stretched out past the end of the school year. An investigating attorney provoked the bully’s parents into filing a complaint against the teacher for her “unprofessionalism” with regard to her reporting of their child’s bullying.

The district recently brought 20 charges against the teacher, the first of which concerns her initial report of bullying. The district appears confident they can nail her for such zingers as "donated five copies of her book to the library" (Charge #8), "sent the Technology Services Help Desk an email" (Charge #11), and "referred to efforts to monitor her as 'double secret probation.'" (Charge # 15).

I am a 61 year old woman who was bullied from the 5th grade until graduation. Why? I moved to a town where I was the new girl. My parents were older than most of the kid's parents, we didn't have a lot of money, so I didn't have a lot of clothes, had curly hair, was overweight, and was younger than the kids in my class. I became their victim from the day I walked in to the class. They called me nicknames and bullied me whenever they saw me, in the class, outside of the class, or even on the phone. They even came to my house to beat me up. As you can understand, I hated going to school. It became torture for me.

To this day, I still don't know why. I keep asking, what did I do. But, I can tell you that the damage these kids did to me followed me through my life. I lost my self-esteem, had two marriages that failed, and always blamed myself for any thing that went wrong with my life. Finally, I am in therapy and have begun to like myself and I married a wonderful man, who accepts me for whom I am.

But, listening to the program today, brought back a lot of bad memories. Lately, I have been trying to find, unsuccessfully, a support group for adults who have gone through bullying. Most of the groups seem to focus on children today, so that they will NEVER experience the trauma that bullying can do to you.

If I could say anything to a child who is being bullied, I would say talk to someone and tell them what is going on. My parents knew what was going on, but I would never tell them who the bullies were (the girls were worse than the boys) I didn't want to be a snitch, I thought I would endure their wrath if they found out.

To those who bully, think about the consequences of your actions. What you do causes a lot of damage, not just the present, but continues on into the future.

Diane, thank you again, for having a program that focuses on a subject that we would never have talked about in 1960. You are to be commended.

I have long believed that talk radio provides the blueprint for bullying..a sort of free DIY. I would like to see some attention paid to our communication industry and their responsibility around the issue of bullying. I think the attempt to legislate the horrible behavior of bullying children and their parents seems a hopeless task when all anyone needs to do is turn on their radio and get all the encouragement they need to continue their harmful behavior. Let's not be sidetracked around the issue, let's go to the source of the problem-the talk radio shows who are not living up to their mandate to provide services for all the people but are serving to support the "us and them" approach to living. Then, in keeping with a much loved approach to a serious issue, it 'trickles down' to our children.

I was bullied in middle and high school, for taking advanced classes and being small. I started going to the gym over the summer between my freshmen and sophmore years in highschool and no one bullied me again, and I have a lifelong hobby/addiction to fitness and weightlifting. Kids need to get a tougher skin and learn to let it roll off your back, or do something about it, not violence, but make yourself less of a target.

If that is typical of her, the administrator in the clip beginning around 21:55 should find a new line of employment. She hurt the situation more than helped things. Why should he believe in the apology when she is the one initiating it, not the other kid? She was using shame to get the kid to do it her way, (I expected more from you or whatever she said). That has ramifications of it's own, and when there is bullying, the bullied side has been getting shamed enough which she's adding to. Even if the bully meant the apology, it could naturally take time for the other kid to believe it after the bully's actions. Too many don't want real solutions, only quick ones.

I was on both side of bullying when I grew up, (more getting bullied than bullying). IMO they are two sides of the same coin. Most of it was about humiliation. I could relate about what was said about going through the gauntlet by the one guest. My situation wasn't nearly as bad as what was mentioned during the show, but one day when I was walking on my paper route past the house where a bully lived, I heard a bullet go past my head.

Any bullying needs to be dealt with and resolved if possible. In any case, due to the power imbalance mentioned by one of the guests, the person being bullied needs to be able to take care of himself and defend himself-physically if necessary. It is not a good thing. It's valuable young human beings with an innate inner dignity just for being we're talking about here!

My first grade teacher, in Pickens, SC, was the class bully. Would have been about 1975 or 6, I suppose. She relentlessly and systmatically humiliated one of my classmates, a thin black girl, for the crime of sucking her thumb. She also waged a gleefully cruel campaign against a boy in our class who was frail and often sick. She'd play infantile tricks on him, once offering him an artfully re-closed empty chocolate milk container, and berate him in front of the class. About a month before Valentine's day, the teacher started to talk up the all-day Valentine's day party she was planning. About a week before the party, she announced to the whole class that our sickly classmate would not be allowed to participate, because he had not been finishing his lunches. The morning of the day after that announcement, a knock came on the classroom door. The teacher opened the door. I remember the look of recognition between this boy and the pretty young lady in the hall. Our teacher stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind her. We heard a smack and a thud. That parent had punched the teacher squarely in the face, laying her out on the floor. You know, it's pathetic that this was required -- but that kid did take part in that god-forsaken Valentine's day party.

Bullied circa 1981-7, I am as many of you, a veteran of something terribly un-American. I learned to forget, not being terribly forgiving, and to this day I have great difficulty remembering names -- I think because of this. I see a lot of former classmates on Facebook these days. Many ask to "friend" me. And you know -- I do. And sometimes I do it just for them.

Sincerely,

Charlie DeArmond, RN / ADN