I saw something different Sunday night, something that Inspired Me. A young child directly in front of me was on his knees praying. I’ve been seeing this miracle a lot recently.

We truly are a blessed people.

By David Winsberg

“Writing is the Struggle Against Silence” Carlos Fuentes

Six months ago I made a decision, which coincided with starting my blog, to no longer follow the news on a daily basis. I noticed that I generally felt lighter when on vacation, and I realized that part of this had to do with the fact that I was no longer being besieged by the horrible information I was reading daily in the national and international news. I noticed I was dreading turning on my computer and reading CNN when I returned from a trip.

Prior to this decision, I felt it was my obligation to stay current on the news, as part of my duty as an informed citizen.

The problem with following the news daily is that it is routinely so horrific, that reading too much of it can cause a very minor version of was is termed, “vicarious traumatization.” This is emotional trauma one absorbs, from exposure to the trauma of others. This is an occupational hazard for mental health professionals, but I had never really considered it as a possible minor, albeit real, by-product of a regular reader/watcher of the news.

Although the trauma one absorbs from reading/watching the news is of much more minor influence than genuine trauma, or even true contact trauma as occurs in vicarious traumatization, it is none the less insidious and valid. I know this personally, because I noticed the effect of reading or watching the news on myself, on the three occasions since my six-month news moratorium, when I did follow the news. The first was the presidential election, the second was Hurricane Sandy, and the third is today.

When I was reading the news about Connecticut today, I saw a minor sub-headline stating something about an Oregon Mall Shooting.

If you remove yourself from reading the news for six months, and then suddenly, read it, you will be shocked at how shocked you are. You will realize how shell shocked and inured you were before from the steady absorption of horribly traumatic news on a daily basis.

I started to write this because I wanted to encourage parents to turn off their TV’s. Children can be harmed by watching this news. If they don’t learn of it, good. If they do and ask you about it, remain calm, answer briefly, and honestly, never provide more information than requested in the question.

But it dawned on me, what is going on, when parents have to be instructed about how to talk to their children about recurrent mass school shootings? They have to add this to their parenting repertoire along with how to deflect child molesters, kidnappers, school bullies who do things like set their schoolmates on fire.

Do you think that something isn’t working? Are guns not the problem? Are people? Are you? Me? Who? Who are you mad at? Who do your blame? Is it this 20 year old person, whose mother was kindergarten teacher, who owned two handguns? His brother now has a dead mother, a dead mass killer brother, and the police will have to protect him from vigilante Americans who will want to do him harm to clarify how wrong violence is.

There are now twenty-seven dead people, including twenty children, and whomever was killed in the Oregon mall. I’m not reading it.

My husband’s brother died at three. I was a therapist for many years for parents whose children had died. This is the worst thing, bar none, that can ever happen to anyone. The trauma reaches across generations. The family’s in Connecticut will need every bit of love, support, help and assistance we can offer, for a very long time.

We need to stop fighting. Blaming. Arguing: For guns/against, Democrat/Republican, Christian/Muslim/Jew.

We need to unite. Pull together.

We have a monstrous problem with violence in this country and the world. It will take the very best attributes of all of us working together, for the common good, to solve the out of control epidemics of bullying and gun violence.

Disagreeing is so easy. Arguing and fighting and finger pointing too. It gets us no where, and besides we’ve been there and been doing that, for long enough.

Word press bloggers worldwide have amazed me with their intelligence, kindness and sensitivity. I was used to the type of bullying verbal abuse that passes for interaction on the internet. I kept waiting for it to arrive in my inbox from a wordpress blogger. But it never came.

We are a mutually supportive, intelligent and creative, international community. What can we do to make a dent in these epidemics of violence? Too many children are dying.  Wordpress’s  Daily Quotation today was, “Writing is the Struggle Against Silence,” by Carlos Fuentes.  Wordress bloggers have a powerful voice. How can we unite and use this to create change?

We need to make violence prevention and intervention, including bullying prevention and intervention, our number one national priority!

My thoughts, prayers, and sorrow go to all the families in Connecticut, and in Oregon, and where ever else murders have occurred since I stopped reading the news.

Physical bullying at school, as depicted in the film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few months ago I wrote briefly about the so called bullying epidemic. I wanted to expand on that somewhat by shifting the metaphor from epidemic to flu. I don’t know whether bullying really qualifies as an epidemic. The Wikipedia page for the word epidemic defines an epidemic as follows:

In epidemiology, an epidemic (from επί (epi), meaning “upon or above” and δήμος (demos), meaning “people”) occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed what is expected based on recent experience. Epidemiologists often consider the term outbreak to be synonymous to epidemic, but the general public typically perceives outbreaks to be more local and less serious than epidemics.

Of course one must allow for a bit of facileness in juxtaposing a social and biological epidemic, but consider a special case of epidemic – a pandemic; defined on Wikipedia as:

A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan ”all” + δῆμος demos ”people”) is an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics generally exclude recurrences of seasonal flu.

English: this is my own version of what bullying looks like (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So bullying is not a pandemic or epidemic. But to stretch this epidemiological metaphor to its limit lets equate the bullying epidemic with a seasonal flu that may be more virulent some seasons than others. Not an H1N1 or other super-bug/virus.

In my earlier post about bullying I scratched the surface of an idea: that media coverage of a topic can increase the likelihood that a meme promoting violent behavior could evolve to become pandemic in scope. This violent meme could contain the seeds of both bullying and revenge. A telltale sign of a violent idea is apathy towards and disregard or denial of the humanity of others; outsiders and those who are different. I’m concerned that bullies will become dehumanized. What will happen when a bully commits suicide? How much can we admonish bullies before we begin tolerating – or even encouraging – revenge?

English: the picture consist of articles on bullying, I obtained it from public domain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m not predicting witch hunts of bullies and such, but I don’t think that we as a country can do much about bullying except continuing advancing towards the Left socially; more accepting of ‘otherness’. That will take time. I’m glad that there is an anti-bullying campaign, but we should keep in mind that we’re not dealing with an exploding epidemic. Bullying existed on Earth before humans did.

Bullying is natural behavior. So is standing up to bullies. Fight the problem but don’t dehumanize the aggressors. Bullies are people too after all. And what do we call people who dehumanize others?

Last time I checked a bus was an inanimate object. It can’t bully or be bullied.

Whilst it may be true that most bullying incidents involving children occur on a school bus, this should not be read as an attack on school buses. Rather it is the children who must take responsibility for their actions.

Last week I wrote about a school that was changing to a compulsory school uniform to try and eliminate bullying. I argued that bullies wont be deterred from bullying just because of this policy. Similarly, bullies don’t need a bus seat to ply their trade.

To make matters worse, the instructions to bus driver to greet students and learn their names is belittling and highly disrespectful. The role of a bus driver is to drive the bus safely. The role of the passengers is to behave with respect.

A video of students taunting, threatening, and degrading school bus monitor Karen Klein gave millions of people a 10-minute glimpse into a growing bullying epidemic.

Roughly 30 percent of middle school and high school students are bullied, and nearly 10 percent of the abuse happens on the school bus, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

But the problem is likely much worse, since nearly two thirds of the incidents are never reported, the department estimates.

Limited supervision and a confined environment make school buses a hotbed for bullying, a recent Slate article notes.

Insufficient training and bullying policies that don’t address a bus driver’s role only compound the problem, Mike Martin, executive director of the NAPT, said in a presentation last year. To address this issue, the NAPT and Department of Education developed a two-part training program specifically for school bus drivers.

Building a rapport with students by greeting them and addressing them by name can help drivers prevent bullying, according to the training materials. When bullying does occur, the training champions the “See something, do something” mantra, instructing drivers to warn the students and inform school administrators.

Excerpt:

We are being told it is part of a bullying epidemic, specifically an anti-gay bullying epidemic. We are told that suicide rates are huge.

Now the numbers don’t back this up.

We’ve talked before on this show that men between 35 and 54 are the most likely group to commit suicide, men in their 90s have among the highest success rates compared to attempts.

Teen boys, specifically gay teen boys killing themselves is tragic, just as every suicide is but it is not an epidemic.

Neither is there an epidemic of bullying in Canada or the United States.

In an op-ed in the Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal, Nick Gillespie detailed how bullying rates in the US have bounced from 28% of kids being bullied in 2005 to 32% in 2007 and then back down to 28% in 2009 the most recent year available.

Here in Canada the rate sits at about 25% of children reporting bullying, a number that has remained fairly steady and is similar to the 20-22% reported by a pair of academics who have studied this issue across Canada.

What are kids bullied about most often?

You would think from the news media that it is sexual orientation but it’s not.

Body image is by far the leader, followed by grades or marks, cultural background, language, gender, religion and then income.

So what is driving this?

I’d say it is an agenda and that agenda was on display last week at the Ontario Legislature.

We’ve discussed the attempt by the McGuinty government in Ontario to force Catholic schools to let kids set up and run their own gay-straight alliance clubs even though such a club would go against Catholic teaching.

Well now it is clear they don’t care. Liberal cabinet minister Glenn Murray selectively quoted from the Catholic Catechism last week. He read the part saying that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” a fancy way of saying they are not the normal way sex is performed. As a gay man Murray obviously would object to that and many of you might as well. But here’s what Murray said next that should worry everyone.

“I have to say to the bishops: ‘You’re not allowed to do that anymore.’”

He is now trying to dictate and bully a religion on what its doctrine should be.

He wants to tell Catholics what they can believe, what they can say, what they can teach.

You don’t need to be Catholic to be concerned that the Ontario government has gone from being co-parent to co-pastor as well.

Forget separation of church and state, in Ontario the McGuinty government will tell you what to believe in your house of worship.

Like the Redford government in Alberta trying to tell homeschooling parents and private schools what they could teach, even about faith, this is disturbing but not a surprising step for the progressive left.

At its heart, this is about control.

Read the whole thing.

Brian Lilley actually talked about this issue on Sun TV, with another Canadian conservative Michael Coren. The video is worth a look.

My gratitude comes from the fact the author, Nick Gillespie, bothers to figure out if we are really in the midst of a bullying crisis. Rage because it seems we are not — and yet here we are, once again, fearing for our children as if they are in danger like never before. Same way we newly fear for our children staying home alone, or walking to school, or doing anything independently. We jump directly to the worst case scenarios and act as if they are happening all the time — increasing, in fact, in number and seriousness — whereupon our terrified society demands new laws, restrictions, handwringing and helicoptering.

Like Gillespie, I am appalled by true bullying and in favor of a society that does not tolerate it. Fortunately, that’s the era we are living in. Bullying is less common today, and less tolerated when it rears its ugly head. Gillespie has the hard numbers, like these:

Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids. When it comes to school violence, the numbers are particularly encouraging. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, the percentage of students who reported “being afraid of attack or harm at school” declined to 4% from 12%. Over the same period, the victimization rate per 1,000 students declined fivefold.

No one is shrugging off the real crime of bullying. But to pretend there’s an epidemic when in fact things are getting better is to both over-react AND sell our kids short. And to lump together unbearable harassment with minor teasing is just a mistake, the same way it is wrong to lump together runaways with kids who are abducted, as if they have experienced the same trauma. (And yet, we do exactly that — the media talk about “missing children,” without bothering to explain that a very small percentage of them were taken by strangers — and it ends up coloring our whole idea of modern day childhood.)

Let me say this again before anyone reminds me that bullying is bad: Bullying IS bad. But so is bullying the public into believing this generation of children is more endangered, more vulnerable and more in need of constant supervision than any generation before it. — L.

Phoebe Prince, a teen from a tiny seaside hamlet in County Clare, Irelandwas a new arrival at South Hadley High School.  She made the mistake of briefly dating a popular football player and was mercilessly tormented for it. 

Students said Phoebe was called “Irish slut” and “whore” on Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook and Formspring.  Her books were routinely knocked out of her hands, items were flung at her, her face was scribbled out of photographs on the school walls and threatening text messages were sent to her cell phone.  One student said it was as if the whole school had ganged up on her.

The relentless harassment became unbearable and school officials chalked it up to “girls being girls” so nothing was done.  Some faculty witnessed physical and verbal abuse and did nothing.  On Jan. 14, 2010 Phoebe was harassed and threatened in the school library and in a hallway.  One of her tormentors threw a red bull can at her as she walked home.  On that day, Phoebe reached a point where she’d had enough.  She walked into her house and hung herself in a stairwell.  The nastiness didn’t even end there.   Her tormentors posted vicious comments on the dead girl’s Facebook memorial page.

Yet she is not alone.  In September 2010, 13 year old Asher Brown of Houston shot himself in the head after enduring what his mother and stepfather say was constant harassment from four other students at Hamilton Middle School in the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District.  His family said, he was “bullied to death” — picked on for his small size, his religion and because he did not wear designer clothes and shoes. Kids also accused him of being gay, some of them performing mock gay acts on him in his physical education class, his mother and stepfather said. 

The 13-year-old’s parents said they had complained about the bullying to Hamilton Middle  School officials during the past 18 months, but claimed their concerns fell on deaf ears.  Brown had been called names and endured harassment from other students since he joined Cy-Fair ISD two years ago. As a result, he stuck with a small group of friends who suffered similar harassment from other students, his parents said.

According to his parents, his most recent humiliation occurred the day before his suicide, when another student tripped Brown as he walked down a flight of stairs at the school.  When Brown hit the stairway landing and went to retrieve his book bag, the other student kicked his books everywhere and kicked Brown down the remaining flight of stairs.

In a more recent case, 15-year-old Devin Lewis had his hair set on fire during a bus ride home from school in Middletown,Ohio.  Lewis said he was listening to music when someone pulled off his hood, and a male student held a flame in front of his face, making him jerk his head back. That’s when another male student lit his hair on fire.

Lewis felt heat and put his hand to the back of his head only to have his fingers covered in ashes.  Other students came to his aid, extinguishing the flames. But Lewis said he was left with charred hair almost to the scalp.  Three teens have been charged in the incident.  While this incident is less tragic, it is still unacceptable to have a child subjected to this type of treatment. 

Sadly, these are just a few of many instances of bullying that go on daily and for some unfortunate kids, for many years.  Here’s a video of another tragic case.  http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Kelly-and-John-Halligan-Share-Their-Son-Ryans-Story-Video  Ryan’s father works to stop bullying and created the following site in memory of his son.  http://www.ryanpatrickhalligan.org/ 

Something needs to change.  Parents, school faculty and students need to be involved to stop the bullying epidemic in it’s tracks. 

Here are some helpful links for parents:

http://kidshealth.org/parent/emotions/behavior/bullies.html

http://stopbullying.gov/

http://www.oprah.com/relationships/How-to-Deal-with-Bullies

http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Teaching-Boys-How-to-Cope-with-Feelings

http://antibullyingprograms.org/

The advice to me by the group was to hit the message of bulllying prevention through social skills education even harder than we had been, that this is a vital area to address in schools.

The surprising comment came from the former Superintendent. I don’t know if he just wasn’t paying attention earlier when I talked about bullying and its epidemic nature, but his comment was:

“Well, perhaps you don’t realize that every school in America is mandated to have some form of anti-bullying program in place, whether third party or home-grown. I don’t see this area as being very viable for you.”

Uh, yeah. Thank you. I DO realize that schools MUST have a program in place, and many do. But, what does it say if, in spite of that mandate and supposedly having those programs in place, we still have 25% or more (it’s over 33% if your kids are ages 12-18) involved in bullying and violence incidents at school?

Tells me something isn’t working. It’s not just enough to put something in place and say, “see, we’re doing all we’re supposed to do.” If it’s not working — which it clearly isn’t — should we be looking for something that IS?

You just can’t put discrete, disconnected policies and programs in place without relating them to everything else the students are doing and enforcing them continuously and expect anything to change substantively. We haven’t made enough of a dent in the problem and it’s our responsbility and obligation to keep working at it until we do. It’s just not acceptable that a quarter of the kids we know are going to be subjected to some sort of harassment, bullying or other anti-social behavior. Why there isn’t a greater uproar is beyond me, but I’m thinking people just don’t KNOW.

I’m glad Mr. former Superintendent feels comfortable knowing that his schools in his former district have their programs in place. Would love to know how that’s working for them… perhaps they had better luck with their efforts than another Superintendent I recently spoke with. Her comment:

“Anti-bullying programs. We’ve given up on them. They don’t work.”

Seems to be the case.