I recently asked my son, then 14, how he wanted to celebrate his birthday. His request was heartbreaking: “Please don’t make me go to school that day. I’d just like to know I can have a day of peace on my birthday.”
Back in the fall, our normally outgoing and happy son was becoming increasingly withdrawn, and we witnessed bouts of what could have been depression. Nearly once a week, he’d say he was sick and beg to stay home.
With some prodding, he confessed that he had been the target of racial and physical bullying at his Catholic high school in Denver since the beginning of the school year. Fellow freshmen routinely ridiculed him for his Indian name and brown skin, blasting him with pathetic stereotypes on a daily basis, belittling his cultural heritage while using taunts to dominate and intimidate him. Multiple times a week, he was grabbed into headlocks, punched and kicked while his attackers taunted him for not fighting back.
As many as 20 percent of high school students say they are bullied at school. Experts believe just as many others experience bullying but don’t report it for fear of being retaliated against. Incredibly, 160,000 teenage victims of bullying skip school every day in this country out of fear.
My husband and I immediately brought the bullying to the attention of the dean of students. The reaction was disbelief. The school’s cultural diversity was offered as evidence that racist bullying could not happen there, its status as a Christian institution touted as proof that victimization was non-existent — arguments akin to suggesting racism no longer exists in America because we have a black president, and claiming Muslims alone are responsible for all the terrorism in the world.
Kathleen Keelan, a local anti-bullying expert with Prevention Consultants, LLC, a bullying prevention and safe-schools consulting group, states it is not uncommon for a school to fail to realize that bullying — particularly racist bullying — happens within its walls on a significant level. “Often, when you speak with schools about bullying, they talk about what many of us think of as the schoolyard bully — the kid who threatens to beat you up after school for getting straight A’s,” says Keelan. Moreover, school administrators and teachers, she says, seem to hold fast to the notion that bullying is a fact of life, a right of passage, and that little can be done about it.
Despite our multiple meetings and phone conferences with school officials, our son’s bullies were left in the school, ultimately beating him up between classes and causing physical injury. For months, we had begged the school to implement an anti-bullying program, a common offering at many Colorado public schools following the Columbine tragedy, but were ignored. Schools with intervention programs report half as many incidents of bullying as those schools without a formal program, reports Keelan.
Clearly, bullying is not merely kid’s play. When left unchecked, it can lead to harrowing results, as the family of Phoebe Prince — the 15-year-old bullying victim from Massachusetts who ultimately committed suicide — is painfully aware. As parents, we should actively demand that schools provide us with an unwavering commitment to present a learning environment that is free of torment, no matter how seemingly insignificant. As a society, we need to insist that all schools formally address bullying.
Take the time to ask school administrators about bullying education and intervention efforts. Your child’s well-being may well depend on it.
Rhonda Hackett of Denver is a clinical psychologist.
