It was 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon in November 1996 when 13-year-old Andy(*) walked out the door of Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View, CA, having stayed after classes for a tutoring session. The school is in a neighborhood of modest ranch houses, their lawns strewn with toys–the sort of place where parents feel comfortable letting their children play outside unattended. On his way home, Andy didn’t have to fear gang shootings or drug dealers battling for turf. Yet the eighth grader had a different menace to worry about.
Bullying is bull!
As Andy left school for the day, he found himself surrounded by five adolescent boys. The leader of the pack, a 14-year-old high school freshman named Jared, stood close to six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds, nearly twice as much as Andy. Jared grabbed Andy and held him so the other boys could punch him. Then Jared warned that if Andy didn’t come with them willingly, if they had to make him things were going to get worse.
Andy knew to take the threat seriously; this was not his first encounter with Jared and company. Only a couple of weeks earlier, they had roughed up Andy at a party, then repeatedly held him underwater in a swimming pool–just for laughs. Too intimidated to tattle, and too fearful of retribution, Andy didn’t say a word to his family about the harrowing encounter.
Ask most parents to conjure up a schoolyard bully and they’ll remember the big kid who took other children’s lunch money or shoved them around when the teacher wasn’t looking–an endurable if unpleasant part of growing up. But they’d scarcely picture a living nightmare like Jared, whose sadistic acts against fellow students ran to dangerous extremes.
On this particular afternoon, Jared had plotted some really twisted fun. He and his buddies marched Andy to the mobile home where Jared lived with his mother, who at this time of day was still at the computer company where she worked. Along the way, they smacked their prey over the head with his loose-leaf binder. Once inside, one boy hastily cleared the furniture from the living room while the others handcuffed Andy. Jared started throwing punches, then all the boys joined in, using their fists and feet.
Over the next two hours, Andy, pleading for mercy all the while, was whipped with a chain, burned with candle wax, and shot in the back with a BB gun. With dusk approaching, a battered, bruised, and bleeding Andy was tossed out the door with a warning: Don’t tell anyone what happened to you.
After staggering to a fast-food restaurant, Andy telephoned his father with a trumped-up tale of having been kidnapped and brutalized by a band of men. Enter the police, who finally persuaded Andy to tell the truth. Jared and his cohorts were promptly arrested and charged with kidnapping, assault, and torture.
If Jared were an isolated example, we could all rest easier. But the bully problem is bigger than most of us think. Seventeen of junior high school students admit to being victims of in-school intimidation, physical assault, or robbery, according to a 1995 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. And authorities who’ve investigated bullying suspect that the numbers are much higher. “Thirty to forty-five percent of kids in the suburbs I’m Familiar with tell us they’re being bullied,” says Leawood, KS, police officer Randy Wiler, who’s trained teachers and administrators at schools throughout the Kansas City, KS, area on how to deal with the problem.
What’s more, today’s bully is not just an inner-city phenomenon. Nine percent of suburban students reported being victims of violence, roughly the same proportion as in urban schools, according to a 1997 study by the Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank. The trend is escalating; 54 percent of principals of suburban schools polled during 1988 to 1993 said violence had increased on their school premises. Not only is the frequency of incidents up, but so is the level of ferocity. For example, in suburban Fresno, CA, in February 1996, a high school junior was surrounded by a dozen other boys outside the lunchroom and beaten so severely that he suffered a concussion and temporary memory loss. One attacker subsequently was convicted of felony assault. Researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans found that 8 percent of suburban high school students thought it was okay to shoot someone who had offended or insulted them, and 20 percent thought it was appropriate to open fire if someone stole from them.
Indeed, in the most extreme cases, bullies do graduate to killing. Witness the shooting deaths of four girls and a teacher outside a middle school in Jonesboro, AR, last March, allegedly by two boys, 11 and 13 years old. The 13-year-old, Mitchell Johnson, was described by one schoolmate as a bully who “could pick on anybody that would let him.” Just two months later, in Springfield, OR, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel, who had “an anger problem,” according to one classmate, allegedly shot his parents to death, after which, armed with a semiautomatic rifle and a backpack full of ammunition, he went to school and allegedly opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22.
Jared’s troubles surfaced early on. School records describe him as having “control problems” and being “defiant and belligerent” as far back as second grade. He was fanatical about the World Wrestling Federation and loved to act out the violent fantasies he spent countless hours watching on TV. Jared’s mother, divorced from his father, attributes Jared’s troubles to a learning disability and severe attention deficit disorder. After the boy’s arrest, the California Youth Authority mental-health team assigned to his case said Jared had a propensity for dangerous behavior and was “an immature, intensely self-centered, and probably truly narcissistic individual who sees his own behavior as acceptable in every case.”
Jared’s mother had a close, protective relationship with her son–and that, authorities argue, may have only contributed to the problem. The mental-health team theorized that “Jared’s mother has condoned and excused her son’s negative behaviors for many years, not holding him responsible and thereby exacerbating such behaviors. Both Jared and his mother believe that he is misunderstood and mistreated and is just fine the way he is.” Indeed, despite Jared’s eventual guilty plea to kidnapping, attempted torture, and “using force likely to cause great bodily harm,” his mother claims he was actually the victim–of teasing by peers about his size and weight. One day four years ago, his mother says, “Jared came home and stood in front of our full-length mirror and said, `Mommy, am I scary?’ And I told him, `No, honey, you’re not scary, you’re just a big handsome boy.’” (In a chilling footnote, after Jared’s arrest, his mother was arrested for allegedly ramming her truck into a car driven by the mother of a witness in the case against her son. She eventually pled no contest to felony hit-and-run and was sentenced to 200 days in jail and five years of probation. She also had to pay $1,600 in restitution to the victim.)
The consequences of coddling bullies can be tragic. Last April, a 12-year-old Wayne, NJ, boy brought a pellet gun to school, hoping to scare a bully into leaving him alone; he ended up suspended from school, then pled guilty to unlawfully possessing a weapon. And in 1993, after several years of torment from bullies who’d bang his head into lockers and trip him in hallways, 14-year-old Curtis Taylor of Burlington, IA, killed himself.
When Schools Pass the Buck
Clearly, kids can’t be expected to solve a bullying problem by themselves. The trouble is, parent’s can’t count on schools to protect their children, either. Victims often charge that authorities don’t do enough to prevent bullying and sometimes even look the other way. For example, Jared’s school records describe him as difficult, according to law-enforcement officials who’ve reviewed them, but the files contain no mention of attacks, and the principals at both middle schools he attended say they don’t recall any seriously violent incidents.
All of which leads Rick Gardner, the Santa Clara County deputy district attorney who prosecuted Jared in juvenile court, to take a skeptical view. “When you’ve got a kid with this many problems, it’s hard to believe that the schools didn’t notice his violent behavior,” he says. And the parents of another of Jared’s victims recall that shortly after they went to the school to demand protection, Jared was abruptly transferred; the principal contended that she discovered by chance that Jared actually lived within the boundary of a neighboring school district.
In fact, schools have been found to neglect documenting bullies’ attacks and to pass the problem along to someone else, according to the National School Safety Center’s Ronald Stephens, himself a former school administrator. “A lot of administrators don’t want a paper trail,” he explains. “It’s fear of litigation and a reluctance to look bad.”
Desperate parents have resorted to legal action. In Export, PA, Elizabeth Barcellino recalls the day in the fall of 1996 when her daughter, Christina, then a seventh grader at Franklin Regional Junior High School, came home from school terrorized because two gifts on the bus had tried to set her hair on fire. After Barcellino reported the attack to a school official, the situation worsened, according to a lawsuit filed by the Barcellinos and another family, the Clingers, whose daughter was also harassed. The bullies and their friends began harassing Christina and her classmate, Jessica Clinger, staring at them menacingly and hitting and shoving them in school hallways.
Instead of taking action to stop the bullies, the lawsuit alleges, the school’s vice principal advised the girls to keep a low profile and wait for the bullies to move on to someone else. At another point, he sent the two girls home, fearing he could not guarantee their safety. Eventually the school board assigned a teacher’s aide to escort Christina and Jessica to classes, but the bullies allegedly remained undaunted; they continued to harass the pair in the hallways even in the escort’s presence. Eventually, the parents of the victimized girls withdrew them from the school. (A lawyer representing the school district argued in court that a school does not have a legal duty to protect students from other students.)
Like the Barcellinos and the Clingers, parents in other states have tried to pressure schools to take action by going to court. In Brooksville, FL, Al Holm was aghast when his daughter, then 12, came home from school in October 1996 holding an icepack to her head because she’d been punched by a bully on tire school bus. When tire school Failed to punish her attacker, Holm enrolled his daughter in a private school and filed a suit against the school district. Though the school suit is ongoing, the bully pled no contest to battery and was sentenced to community service.
Stopping Bullies in Their Tracks
Some parents, through trial and error, have found ways to work successfully with schools. Lydia Brown of Mansfield, TX, says that when her son, now 13, tint told her he was being harassed by school bullies two years ago, she didn’t grasp the severity of the situation. Instead, she did as many parents would: told her son to either tight back or ignore Iris tormentors. One day last March, after being chased home and pelted with rocks as he frantically tried to unlock the door, the normally nonviolent boy grabbed his BB gun and began shooting at the bullies in frustration. Later, he confided to his mother that he’d considered suicide as an escape.
Brown had five meetings with school officials but says that as far as she could tell little was done that made much difference. Citing school records’ confidentiality, officials wouldn’t even tell her if the bullies had been disciplined.
When her son moved on to junior high, Brown asked for a meeting with her son’s new principal and teachers. “I gave them a list of the bullies from the last school,” she recalls. “I told them, `if he has a problem with these kids, you know this is part of a pattern, not just an isolated thing.’” The school’s principal, she says, let the bullies know that they were being watched to make sure they didn’t pick on anyone in the future. At the start of the school year, there was a minor incident; the principal promptly suspended the bullies for five days, and there have been no further problems.
Meanwhile, in California, Jared’s case was well out of the hands of school officials. A juvenile-court judge, citing Jared’s “horrendous conduct and misbehavior,” sentenced him to a state youth authority prison. (His companions were variously sentenced to reform schools and a local Facility for juvenile offenders.) “I hope, for the sake of his victims, [Jared] stays in prison for as long as possible,” the mother of one of his victims testified at the hearing.
She won’t get her wish. Prosecutor Gardner says that as a juvenile, Jared is likely to serve no more than four years behind bars–and possibly less. Gardner hopes the shock of incarceration will keep Jared from becoming one of the estimated 60 percent of childhood bullies who go on to commit adult crimes. But the prosecutor isn’t optimistic: “Anybody who doesn’t have any empathy and tends to get enjoyment out of hurting other people–that sort of young person can grow up to become one of your Charles Mansons, your Jeffrey Dahmers. They always present a risk.”
RELATED ARTICLE: The Making of a Bully
What turns a child violent? Is it nature or nurture?
A decade of new research suggests that it’s both. “You get an impulsive kid born into a kind household,” explains Kim Masters, M.D., an Asheville, NC, child and adolescent psychiatrist who has treated many youthful aggressors, “and he doesn’t necessarily become a bully. But you put an impulsive child into an abusive setting, and you may have a problem.”
The tendency toward violence appears early. “Aggression in five- and six-year-olds-tantrums, defiance, frequent fights with peers–is not a passing phenomenon,” explains Mark Greenberg, Ph.D., a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College, who specializes in violence prevention. “At least fifty percent of those children are on a pathway to more serious aggression.”
Studies show children are more likely to be abusive if one or both parents were violent as children, suggesting that there may be a genetic link. There is also evidence that some bullies suffer from a brain impairment or have chemical abnormalities that make it difficult for them to control their aggression. Many bullies also suffer from hyperactivity and attention problems, which don’t cause violence per se but may make such behavior harder to control.
Family dynamics play a crucial role too. “Bullies tend to come from homes where there’s less parental control and where the punishment and discipline is inconsistent,” says Richard Hazler, Ph.D., professor of counselor education at Ohio University in Athens, who’s spent the last ten years studying bullies and victims. Unfortunately, overextended single parents may fall prey to such discipline breakdowns more often; a 1996 study by the Indiana University Center for Adolescent Studies in Bloomington revealed that two thirds of the worst bullies at one middle school came from single-parent or stepfamily households.
The Indiana study also found that bullies spent less time with adults in their household and watched more hours of violent television than other children. This can be a particularly combustible combination. “Kids who aren’t violent watch these shows too,” Hazler explains. “But there are mitigating factors-parents or family members who reinforce positive values, like caring about other people.”
The traditional view, that bullies mistreat others because they are insecure and saddled with low self-esteem, is now widely rejected. A brand-new study indicates the opposite: Bullies may have an inflated sense of self-esteem that actually qualifies as narcissism; this helps them justify their mistreatment of others. Bullies also have difficulty thinking of nonviolent solutions to problems and tend to misinterpret others’ innocent actions as hostile. If someone brushes against a bully accidentally, Hazler notes, the bully justifies beating up the person as self-defense. Perhaps the scariest common characteristic, though, is the lack of empathy bullies feel. “They tend to dehumanize their victims,” Hazler notes. “And in their minds, that makes it okay to do whatever they want.” Regardless of the causes, most experts believe that bullying is learned and that intervention can help many bullies alter their behavior.
The world has become more advanced in the last few years and it’s getting more medically advanced day by day. As there is more advanced, so there are more cases of illness and medications. In this information technology era, people are more bent towards anxiety, depression and panic attacks. There are many more causes of panic attacks in people and the panic attack treatment is also present to psychiatrists.
