Bullies Push Young Victims Beyond the Breaking Point

By Hugh C. McBride

Erik Mohat. Megan Meier. Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover. Jared High. Jaheem Herrera.

Five students from different parts of the country, with different backgrounds, different hopes and dreams, different interests and attitudes.

Five students with no connection to each other, save two: All five were victims of bullies. And all five joined a stunningly long list of young people whose desire to escape their pain led them to take their own lives.

About Bullying

In a document titled “Bullying is Not a Fact of Life,” the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) describes bullying as “when one or more persons repeatedly say or do hurtful things to another person who has problems defending himself or herself.”

Brenda High, whose 13-year-old son, Jared, committed suicide after being bullied and assaulted at school, is more direct in her description of the behavior. On the anti-bullying website that she has dedicated to her late son, Mrs. High describes bullying in terms that will surely resonate in post 9/11 America:

The only differences between a terrorist and a bully, is in the organized planning or cause of the activity, and the scale of terror. A bullied child will believe that there is no difference between a terrorist and a bully.

Bullying can take place directly (through hitting, shoving, and verbal abuse) or indirectly (through shunning, spreading rumors, or online attacks known as “cyberbullying”). The following three conditions are present in most incidences of bullying, SAMHSA reports:

   1. A power imbalance exists between the bully and the victim.
   2. The bully's power is derived from physical size, strength, verbal skill, popularity, or gender.
   3. The bully's target feels tormented, helpless, and defenseless.

“Bullying is a form of abuse, harassment, and violence,” the SAMHSA report states. “Parents and school personnel should no longer consider bullying ‘just a part of growing up.’ It is harmful to both the perpetrators and the victims and is responsible for behavioral and emotional difficulties, long-term negative outcomes, and violence.”

The Severity of the Problem

When it comes to the prevalence of bullying in America today, exact numbers are hard to come by, but virtually every organization that has investigated the issue notes that the problem is pervasive.

The National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center (NYVPRC) estimates that about one-third of all U.S. youth are involved in bullying – either as a victim, a perpetrator, or both. A “Facts for Families” document by the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry reports that as many as half of all children and adolescents are bullied at least once during their school years, with about one in 10 suffering from ongoing harassment.

According to the NYVPRC website, a national survey of students in grades six through 10 revealed the following statistical snapshot::

• Thirteen percent of students who were surveyed reported having bullied another student.
• Eleven percent of the students said they had been bullied.
• Six percent told researchers that they had both bullied others and been bullied themselves.

Bullying and Suicide

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for U.S. youth between the ages of 10 and 14, and the third leading cause of death among members of the 15-24 age group.

Bullying is not to blame for every case of adolescent suicide, but both anecdotal reports and scientific studies indicate that the intense emotional strain that is experienced by bullying victims can lead to devastating consequences.

The Nemours Center for Children’s Health Media reports that most teens who were questioned after having attempted suicide said that they did what they did in an attempt “to escape from a situation that seemed impossible to deal with or to get relief from really bad thoughts or feelings.”

Considering that the NYVPRC estimates that as many as 160,000 children stay home from school every day because they fear being bullied, it doesn’t take much of a logical leap to make the connection between the terror of being bullied and the development of life-threatening depression.

The Faces of Youth Suicide

The five young people referenced at the beginnng of this article offer just the slightest glimpse into an epidemic of violence that has ended thousands of young lives.

   According to an April 2 article by Susan Donaldson Jones of ABC News, 17-year-old Eric Mohat endured “merciless” bullying, name-calling, and physical abuse at Mentor (Ohio) High School before killing himself the same day that a fellow student taunted him in class by remarking “Why don’t you go home and shoot yourself, no one will miss you.

Megan Meier, a 13-year-old who is said to have been suffering from depression and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), was at the center of the highly publicized “MySpace” suicide case. Meier took her life after being subjected to a particularly heinous case of online harassment that was later revealed to have been perpetrated by a fellow student and that student’s mother.

Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera were both 11-year-old students (Walker-Hoover at a charter school in Massachusetts; Herrera at a public elementary school near Atlanta, Georgia). Though neither identified as homosexual, both were frequently subjected to verbal harassment that included anti-gay slurs. Both young boys hanged themselves.

Brenda High’s 13-year-old son, Jared, was verbally harassed and physically assaulted by a bully in his public school in Washington state. After one particularly brutal beating at the hands of this bully, Jared’s mother reports, the chiropractor who reviewed the boy’s X-rays remarked that “It looks like he's been through a major car accident.” Suffering from physical injuries, depression, and possibly post-traumatic stress disorder, Jared committed suicide – or, as his mother puts it on her website, “bullycide” – Sept. 29, 1998.
  

How to Help

Obviously, bullying is far worse than a mere childhood annoyance or “rite of passage.” Bullying is an insidious activity that has the potential to permanently alter or even end young lives. Bullying affects both perpetrators and victims, and demands a quick and effective response from parents, school personnel, and other caregivers.

Bullies and their victims are likely to suffer from a wide range of mental health and behavioral conditions, including depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, PTSD, low self-esteem, and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD).

John W. Fleeker of the residential youth treatment program Turn-About Ranch has written about the connection between ADHD and bullying. The American Psychological Association, Fleeker writes, has described the typical bully as “impulsive, easily frustrated, dominant in personality, [having] difficulty conforming to rules, viewing violence positively and more likely to have friends who are bullies."

Obviously, the primary course of action when dealing with a bullying situation is to stop the violence and threats. Once this has been accomplished, it is imperative that both the bully and the victim are provided with appropriate treatment that will allow them to conquer their inner demons, overcome past traumas, and (in the cases of the perpetrators) learn to control their unacceptable behaviors.

For far too many victims of bullying, the damage that they have endured cannot be undone. But for those who are currently experiencing the physical pain and emotional terror of bullying, help is available – but only if those who are in a position of responsibility take the swift and appropriate action that this crisis demands.