What if bullying was 1% responsible?

[dsc]

I recall watching a movie or TV show with a brilliant closing argument about tobacco. It was centered on the notion that tobacco was just a little responsible for many deaths. They wound up winning.

Clearly bullying isn't totally, mostly, or even over a quarter responsible. But what if it is just a little repsonsible for Columbine, Jonesboro, Virginia Tech, Edinboro, or any of the other dreadful scenes of carnage we have seen in the last decade and a half. What if even one of them would have been avoided if we treated bullying like the crime it is? Wouldn't it be worth it? It isn't like bullying serves a useful purpose.

Just today a kid was sent home from my school for saying that he could do a better job than the VT killer did. I don't have the kid in class nor even know who he is. I do know he wears eye shadow and has said he is bisexual (he is in some of my student's classes). It doesn't take a leap to think he might have been picked on a time or two.

I admit, when I first heard of Columbine part of me, a very dark part of me, understood the emotions that lead to what they did. Feeling a lone is something I quite well understood in middle and high school. Wanting to get back at my tormentors in the worst possible way is something I understood. Did I, or even more than a few of the victims of bullies go nuts and kill people? No. But what if just a few, do?

Go ahead and read some of the stories posted in the last few days. Read about the kid who got permantently injured in gym class. Read about the kid beaten at night by his roommates crying for a teacher to save him who instead set him up for it. Read about the kid who was repeatedly thrown off busses due to supposedly being a molester, solely because he was gay. Read about the kid pissed on in the showers. And remember, these were kids, not adults. Go ahead and read about them and then say, bullying is no big deal.

I drank until I was 32 years old. I went to college a dozen hours from home. I hated myself for years. To this day I fear telling people I am gay for fear that like the kids I went to school with they will hate me for it. Each day I get better. Each day I get stronger. But every once in awhile, those tapes play. And I wonder if those kids were right.

Who knows all the reasons those shooting occured? But what if bullying is just a small part of the answer? Is the right of the strong to terrorize the weak worth that small part? Is it worth the suicide of Terry?

I know kids have to be kids. I know some will fight or play rough from time to time. But there is that, and there is putting a kid through Hell. It doesn't take the second coming of Einstein to know the difference.

[MichiganVote]

1. Look, bullying hurts...its true. But killers kill. And mentally ill people are a fact of life

And in the meantime, the US allows anybody that is breathing to purchase a gun in a store, online, or at a gun show.

So ok, for those who feel they are still suffering from bullying, fine, have your feelings, its ok to have them.

But the 32 who are dead....they got nothing. They're dead from a gun, from a killer who was very mentally ill. He didn't go to the classrooms to bully. He went to kill.

[ends_dont_justify]

4. can't we end both? N/T

[AZBlue]

10. And both are related - while those who bully or are bullied may not be

mentally ill, they do have issues. Mental healthcare should address all levels of issues. Mild to moderate depression, for example, is the leading cause of absenteeism and low productivity level in the workplace. All mental health issues need a lot of attention in this country.

[MichiganVote]

29. No. Some people will bully. And some people will kill. But not all bullies and not all

those who are mentally ill will become killers.

Bullies can be of several or more types. The ignorant, the unlearned, the self indulgent, the uncivilized, the cruel, the malevolent, the psychopath. The psychopath will kill.

Mental illness. The majority of those who are deemed to suffer from mental illness AND who kill are usually these: the psychopath, the psychotics, the paranoid schitzophrenic. These are the ones to watch out for.

End bullying? Nice but not likely. End killing? Fortunately these mass killings are rare. End easy access to these ridiculous weapons in everyday society? That's doable when there is the will to do it.

[MichiganVote]

2. Dupe

[pitohui]

3. but at virginia tech wasn't the shooter also the bully/stalker?

everybody has been picked on, at least everybody my size has been picked on, if you let it get to you, well, you just can't let it get to you, life is too short

if you consider it bullying that people laugh at you once in awhile then yeah we have all been bullied and it is a problem that can't be solved because it is part of the human condition

what i've heard of this case is that cho was himself the stalker, the bully, the terrorist, not the other way around, everybody or at least everybody female, both students and teachers, were walking on eggshells around this creep because nothing was done about his stalking/threatening behavior

in this case it seems to me that letting cho get away with stalking/bullying set up the situation...? we all know that at the end of the day, the next time a girl is stalked on some campus, the college will once again cover up and put it under the rug and nothing will done just like this time until the boy actually does snap and kill someone -- colleges have too much money at stake and they will lie about the actual statistic occurrence of stalking and threatening of female students

are we supposed to pretend that cho is the one whose delicate feelings were hurt by bullying? where? when? in his columbine fantasies? any proof at all he was victim rather than victimizer?

i'm asking not telling but so far i've heard little to make me give a care about poor bullied cho, i wonder more about the women he stalked and terrified

i don't believe cho killed anyone because he was bullied, he killed because he wanted to bully a girl into surrendering her life into his control and when she wouldn't do it, he went bugfuck

bullying is a problem but let's not kid ourselves about who is doing the bullying

[dsc]

5. Cho clearly had a galaxy of problems

He should have had an intervention at some point given the down right creepy behavior. I do think that it is much less likely that bullying was a major impact on Cho.

[pitohui]

6. my read of it is that cho was himself a bully who wanted to bend others (girls) to his will EOM

,

[dsc]

7. In high school he was picked on quite a bit

according to what I saw. That doesn't excuse his behavior in any case.

[pitohui]

8. in high school! crap, wasn't he 24?

this wasn't about high school, this is about being rejected by a love interest who should have had every right to say "this ain't working" and go on about her life w.out being in fear

we were all picked on in high school, that's the entire purpose of it, to introduce primates to the primate pecking order

it's too bad that we are monkeys but i don't think finding out he was a monkey at age 14 is any excuse for what he did a decade later...?

[dsc]

9. actually the love interest angle is wrong

The ex boy friend was the person of interest who the police interviewed after the first murder but before the second set of murders. He did stalk two women but neither one were victims of the shooting.

[pitohui]

15. but if he had been detained for the stalking he wouldn't be available to shoot anyone

i'm still bothered that the stalking of women is okay and still tolerated on usa campuses, if it had been taken seriously, this wouldn't have happened because he would have been in custody

instead they bent over backward to accommodate the stalker, even one of his teachers held a separate class just for the creep

in my parish (county) a brutal murder just occurred, a woman got a restraining order and went into hiding, her husband hunted her down and shot her dead in the street, shot their son, tried to kill their daughters as well -- the police said the woman did everything right but to my mind the cops are the ones who fell down -- they KNEW this guy had threatened to kill the woman and that he was armed and they sent her away with a useless piece of paper (the restraining order) instead of arresting him for making terroristic threats

his family would be alive now if the cops would do their damn job but they simply don't take it seriously when a woman is threatened with being hunted down like a dog

well he will be in prison for the rest of his life if he is not executed but it doesn't bring life back to his victims

it seems that bullying is considered bad if a man is bullied, but if it's a woman who is bullied and threatened, it's just "too bad so sad honey you can pay $80 for this worthless piece of paper if you like"

[dsc]

16. They had him mentally evaluated

and went to the police on several occasions. It is hard to fault the campus on this. Without seeing the exact text of the messages it is hard to know why the police didn't deal with him more seriously. But this wasn't ignored by authorities. As a public school employee I can honestly say that the separate class was almost certainly done to get him out of the class he was in quickly. Expelling a student is damn difficult and time consuming.

[pitohui]

19. obviously the mental evaluation was wrong

can you say malpractice?

if we really have no better ability to remove people who are actively threatening and stalking girls than this, then it's a sad comment on the validity of medical science, it seems we actually don't have the technology to distinguish a dangerously insane person from the run of the mile goth guy scribbling some depressed screeds

[dsc]

We try to error on the side of not committing people who shouldn't be committed

Maybe we shouldn't do that, but currently we do. It is a very high standard to get a person committed and apparently he didn't meet it.

[flying_monkeys]

28. I read that the stalking consisted of

emails two students didn't like, taking photos of knees and legs under tables with a cellphone, and (I am not sure if this was included/same two complainants) someone drew a ? (questionmark sign) on a wall/(forget) in a female quad room, and Cho had signed his name one time on a sign in sheet as ?, so the inference was maybe he wandered through their quad-rooms (again, I can't recall if that was one of the incidences reported as made by a complainant).


While worrisome, I am not sure I consider that to be "actively threatening and stalking".


The problem with someone like Cho is that he isn't "dangerously insane" until he actually shows up with the guns and is in psychosis. His 3 roommates even said he wasn't any different that particular morning when he woke up....but clearly, he was.


I sincerely wish that we knew more about mental health issues so we all COULD tell the difference between "different drummer" and "OMG he is gonna blow!"....


I also sincerely wish we could find a different way to protect women from (usually) men who want to harm them, because restraining orders aren't worth the ink used to print them up. The ***MOST*** dangerous time for a women is the first few days/weeks after she takes out a restraining order. Far too many end up dead in short order. :(

[salin]

25. stalking two women is a warning sign.

While I don't want to detract from the discussion of bullying - I have to concur with folks who aver that he went from bullied to ... stalker and in that sense bully. This is such a hard discussion because it inadvertedly links the later victims (prior to the massacre) to victimization. It is hard to tease that apart. The point of responsibility vs victimization vs the "responsibility" (none present in current facts) of the additional victims.

Many of us have been victims of awful actions of others (be it perpetual bullying, to abuse, to rape, and so on) and many of us do not act on it to a) hurt the actual perpetrators of said abuse or b) generalize the revenge to random folks who had nothing to do with the abuse. That then gets to the point of mental health questions. In the sense that many have been subject to awful events (which is an issue) that do not react in such a violent and fatal effort.

I think the lessons to be learned are complex - and will take a while before those lessons are clear - in terms of what might have been done (if anything) to prevent such a tragic consequence.

[dsc]

27. I am not saying it isn't

nor that he didn't give warning signs but it isn't like the University did nothing here. They tried to deal with this situation but ran into a legal wall. I don't see where his stalking of these women was ignored.

[brentspeak]

11. The articles say that he compared himself to Jesus Christ in his filmed rants

That's a classic psychotic symptom. Bullying, as harmful as it is, can't induce psychosis. (I'm not defending school bullying, which, for all practical purposes, is actually both criminal assault and harassment.)

[dsc]

14. I could see it making psychosis worse

[AZBlue]

12. The bullied turn into bullies, just like the abused turn into abusers.

Cho was bullied when he was younger, learned that as a way to strike back, and turned into something of a bully himself. There's plenty of evidence that he was a victim of bullying and I'm guessing it's something you've never experienced or researched or you'd have a better understanding of it. No, being laughed at is NOT being bullied - not even close - and if you refer to it as being "picked on" then that's not bullying either.

[pitohui]

17. but the abused mostly DON'T turn into abusers

i would never hit a child, and you are going to find that a great many people who have experienced abuse are, if anything, utterly incapable of passing on that abuse

i bet that there are thousands of DUers who have experienced physical or sexual assault or abuse and would not lift a hand to hurt another person the way they have been hurt, it is utterly anathema to them

all abusers should not be put in a category of hopeless mentally ill guaranteed to in turn cause hurt and harm to others

being a victim of abuse has become a stigma, it is like there is something wrong with YOU, like you are considered a powder keg to go off, so you cannot even be honest about your own experience because people think you are going to turn into charles whitman or something

[dsc]

18. Of course they don't

just like the vast majority of poor people don't turn to crime but no one scoffs at the notion eliminating poverty would cut crime.

[pitohui]

21. well i would like to see abuse brought to an end

it is just a personal peeve of mind that bullying is a serious matter when it's a male being bullied but it is a trivial matter when it is a female being bullied, a female being stalked feels fear and has generally has less in the way of physical resources to be able to protect herself from the bully

i guess if the only way to get any attention to bullying is to focus on the bullied guy rather than the bullied girls...so be it...reality is what it is

[dsc]

23. The university appeared to take this very seriously

and for apparently good reason. He was referred to a mental health screening, removed from a class, and referred to the university discipline system. Rest assured none of the bullies in the cases described on this board had that happen. Clearly they should have at least made him go to couseling as a condition of attending classes. But they did try to fix this problem.

[AZBlue]

30. Of course not - that's not even a valid argument, sorry.

A majority of bullies and a majority of abusers were bullied and abused, respectively. That's the data that counts.

[jobycom]

20. Then wouldn't stopping bullying have stopped him?

I agree, his behavior in the last few years seems to have been aggressive towards a couple of people (we don't know, maybe more). A policy of treating such behavior as not normal, not acceptable, might have led to a greater scrutiny of Cho, which might have led to him being treated.

Cho was mentally ill. The bullying in itself would not have caused that, he would have to have some physical predisposition towards it. But the bullying would have helped shape his specific delusions. And again, putting an emphasis on that type of behavior not being okay might have led to him being diagnosed earlier. Though, of course, we don't know all the details of who tried to help him.

As for him wanting to bully a girl into surrendering her life into his control--I don't know what that refers to. His stalking? I haven't heard anything about any of this being caused by a girl rejecting him.

And I don't know that anyone really feels sorry for Cho, especially the Cho who did this. For me, I have sympathy for what he went through because I know what mentally ill people go through. I am sick with anger that he was not diagnosed properly before it was too late. I can even feel sorry for what he went through up until he began shooting. At that point, my sympathies clearly switch to his victims. But that doesn't mean I can't try to understand what happened to make him the way he was.

[pitohui]

22. yeah he should have been detained

there should be zero tolerance of stalking, whereas news reports claim that SEVERAL girls report being stalked by cho

[jobycom]

24. I agree, zero tolerance of stalking, which to me is the ultimate form of bullying

The problem was when he was turned in in 2005 by two women for stalking, neither wanted to pursue the matter, so he was just told to stop it, basically. And he did, it seems, unless there are holes in the story. Or at least that's the last time, from what I've heard so far, that he was accused of it.

Stalking is a crime that should be charged even if the victim doesn't pursue charges. The only way, it seems to me, to end it is to end the effectiveness of the stalker threatening the victim out of pressing charges. If stalking were a crime independent of the victim's participation in charging and going to court, then the stalker would get nowhere out of threatening the victim, and the victim wouldn't be made to feel that pursuing the case would only inconvenience her. I don't know how to make that work, but that's my theory at the moment on the matter. :)

[papau]

26. abuse does cause mental illiness as the body excapes the real world -DSC's point of less

bullying would make for for a better society and less mental problems is a valid one in my opinion.

[jobycom]

13. Bravo.

Bullying isn't a right, it's a violation of someone else's rights. While not all bullying is going to turn someone into a murderer, it is going to damage people in ways unseen. And there is always the chance of another mentally ill student getting pushed too far. There's no place for bullying. It will always happen, but the attitude I've seen of some people that bullying is just playful, just teasing and joking, is just wrong. It is not a right of passage, or expected behavior in "boys," or anything positive or natural. It's abuse, it's assault, it's dehumanizing, and no one should condone it. There may be a fine line at times over what is bullying and what is normal growth. But there are times when the line is not fine at all, when it is obvious to everyone. That's when it needs to be stopped.

We can all remember when Abu Ghraib was minimized by BushCo as "hazing." Let's not let people convince us that bullying is really not all that bad. The abuses at Abu Ghraib, it should be obvious, was the same basic mindset as bullying. Maybe we would not only stop the next bullying victim from becoming Seung-Hui Cho, but stop the next bully from becoming Donald Rumsfeld.

[flying_monkeys]

31. Those stories made me hurt.

I wanted to turn back time and go find each of those posters and give them a hug while DEMANDING their schools step in and DO SOMETHING! (Or, conversely, I would kick the crap out of their tormentors, or at the very least, since I am not-so-big, wound them verbally). Their wounds are still very real and accessible, even after many years.... And worse yet is the doubt that lingers suggesting maybe they really DID deserve what was said/done to them....


Even if bullying is only 1%, I think it is too much to add to the recipe of Mixing A Kid and I think it is time for us all to step in and put an end to it. Maybe at some point it had an evolutionary purpose - - maybe - - but that purpose is no longer necessary.


I resolve to step in if I ever witness it in my kids' schools. I'll teach Empathy, not bullying... Now watch me get stabbed by thugs the first time I intervene at son's highschool next year (j/k)

[dsc]

32. kick