What Can Be Done To End Bullying In Schools and Colleges? - Page 2

Originally Posted by BR

So you get a free pass for Prop 8 in the first place? While destruction of property is wrong, this is society lashing out AGAINST a bully.

Originally Posted by BR

Aimed at discriminating against a group of people who never did anything to you to deserve your bullying.

The story of Tyler Clementi is bringing to light the darker side of the pervasiveness of social media in young peoples lives. Its prompting renewed calls for everything from more specific antibullying education to stronger consequences for harmful uses of media technology.

[C]an the new media itself, in part, be blamed for such cases?


says Scott Foulkrod, a philosophy professor at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania. The school recently blocked the use of social media for a week to prompt discussions about its role in everyday life.

Other observers of youth culture and media culture believe the media environment including reality shows that use hidden cameras is desensitizing young people to the hurtful effects of their actions.


says Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance, an education program based at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

One recent University of Michigan study found that college students empathy declined by about 40 percent between 1979 and 2009, with the biggest drop-off occurring after 2000.

Were seeing more and more of this callous indifference, Ms. Aftab says. She doesnt want to paint a whole generation with a broad brush, because many young people are using social media only for good. But when malicious intent or even just a notion of entertainment is paired with the instant nature of Web-broadcasting technology, you can do it, and you get caught up in it, she says. Its that lack of time to contemplate the consequences.

Nina Montgomery, a freshman at Dartmouth who attended high school with Clementi in Ridgewood, N.J., says her generation of digital natives is getting bored and looking for ways to experiment with new technology. As a result, she believes, more cases as severe as this one at Rutgers will occur. I dont think people understand the great responsibility that comes with the power of the Internet, she says.

According to school antibullying experts, its essential to appeal to bystanders. But if someone is watching a video on his or her personal device, that individual is a further step removed and may not even know if the images are real or staged.

Cyberspying and other forms of cyberbullying not only show a lapse in college students empathy, but also indicate that we need to work with them on their critical thinking skills, says Gwen Dungy, executive director of NASPA, a group of student-affairs administrators in Washington. Her group started the Enough Is Enough campaign in conjunction with K-12 educators in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, to stem social violence by helping students understand how to build a sense of community.

Tolerance for differences, including homosexuality, should be promoted widely on college campuses, Ms. Dungy says.

Clementis story has rallied the gay community, with everyone from Ellen DeGeneres to former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey speaking out in recent days.

We cant allow bullying, period, for any students, but we do need to bring up the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] component. If you dont confront the reasons why people are being bullied, youve failed to fix that problem, says Paul Guequierre, deputy press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group in Washington.

At least three younger teens killed themselves in September after experiencing homophobic bullying.

Originally Posted by segovius

Yes...the reasons in the first group.

We could put 'fat' in their too as society deems people who are over-weight as somehow subhuman - of course this is for financial reasons so they can leverage the 'beauty' aspect of being thin. This also has the advantage of keeping women downtrodden and fucked-up too...

Anyway, love to see your examples of straights, whites and rich kids being bullied by their counterparts.

I'm around for a while so you can take your time.

What began as an effort by the animated TV show "South Park" to lampoon prejudice found a life of its own at a Calabasas middle school after a Facebook page inspired some students to attack redheaded 7th- and 8th-graders, officials said today.

Three boys have been booked for various crimes connected with the "ginger bashing" carried out Nov. 20 at A.E. Wright Middle School. The Facebook page had dubbed it "National Kick a Ginger Day."

Four girls and three boys were the victims of physical or verbal abuse because of their red hair, freckles and pale complexions. Detectives are still trying to determine how long each attack lasted, but one may have been up to a half-hour, officials said.

CALABASAS -- Sheriff's officials say three boys detained in connection with at least seven attacks on red-haired students at a local middle school could be put in a diversion program rather than face a formal criminal complaint.

Two 12-year-old students and a 13-year-old student at A.E. Wright Middle School were arrested last month and released to the custody of their parents.

The 12-year-olds were booked on suspicion of battery on school property, and the 13-year-old boy was accused of threatening to inflict injury by means of electronic communication, also known as "cyber-bullying," said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the L.A. County Sheriff's Department.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office is still deciding whether to charge the students. The case was presented to a juvenile prosecutor on Monday morning, according to a district attorney spokesperson.

Whitmore says it's possible charges could be dropped, and the boys instead placed in the District Attorney's Juvenile Offender Intervention Network, which deals with nonviolent, first-time juvenile offenders in an out-of-court setting.

Originally Posted by segovius

Too white? Or not white enough?

Lighter-skinned Latinos in the United States make $5,000 more on average than darker-skinned Latinos. The education test-score gap between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans is nearly as large as the gap between whites and blacks.

The Harvard neuroscientist Allen Counter has found that in Arizona, California and Texas, hundreds of Mexican-American women have suffered mercury poisoning as a result of the use of skin-whitening creams. In India, where I was born, a best-selling line of womens cosmetics called Fair and Lovely has recently been supplemented by a product aimed at men called Fair and Handsome.

This isnt racism, per se: its colorism, an unconscious prejudice that isnt focused on a single group like blacks so much as on blackness itself. Our brains, shaped by culture and history, create intricate caste hierarchies that privilege those who are physically and culturally whiter and punish those who are darker.

Colorism is an intraracial problem as well as an interracial problem. Racial minorities who are alert to white-black or white-brown issues often remain silent about a colorism that asks how black or how brown someone is within their own communities.

If colorism lives underground, its effects are very real. Darker-skinned African-American defendants are more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty as lighter-skinned African-American defendants for crimes of equivalent seriousness involving white victims. This was proven in rigorous, peer-reviewed research into hundreds of capital punishment-worthy cases by the Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt.

Take, for instance, two of Dr. Eberhadts murder cases, in Philadelphia, involving black defendants one light-skinned, the other dark. The lighter-skinned defendant, Arthur Hawthorne, ransacked a drug store for money and narcotics. The pharmacist had complied with every demand, yet Mr. Hawthorne shot him when he was lying face down. Mr. Hawthorne was independently identified as the killer by multiple witnesses, a family member and an accomplice.

The darker-skinned defendant, Ernest Porter, pleaded not guilty to the murder of a beautician, a crime that he was linked to only through a circuitous chain of evidence. A central witness later said that prosecutors forced him to finger Mr. Porter even though he was sure that he was the wrong man. Two people who provided an alibi for Mr. Porter were mysteriously never called to testify. During his trial, Mr. Porter revealed that the police had even gotten his name wrong his real name was Theodore Wilson but the court stuck to the wrong name in the interest of convenience.

Both men were convicted. But the lighter-skinned Mr. Hawthorne was given a life sentence, while the dark-skinned Mr. Porter has spent more than a quarter-century on Pennsylvanias death row.