Last May, Jamey Rodemeyer added his video to the "It Gets Better Project", the Internet video site where adults share hope with LGBT teens, a minority likely to be bullied by even the adults in their lives and suffer a disproportionately high suicide rate. On Monday, the 14-year-old teen from Buffalo, N.Y., was found dead outside his home, having apparently taken his own life.
This is sad to here when a 14 year old takes his own life because of bullying at his school. Ref: http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/09/21/7879728-teen-c... for story! Richard
Comments
It's indefensible that they
It's indefensible that they don't stop the fucking bullying. It can't be that hard to put out a teacher to look over a constant bullying victim.
But then the teachers might join in. Is Buffalo a city? They should have changed the school... or something...
Stuff like this just makes me angry. That a kid commits suicide because his ashole classmates just can't leave him or her alone.
Buffalo
Buffalo is a MAJOR city in New York State.
For what it's worth, some places ARE taking bullying seriously. I've already seen benefits of the new law here in New Jersey... Will it work, long time? I don't know - but for now, the teachers/admins/staff are taking the law seriously and doing the "right thing" for those who are targets of it. The targets need to be willing to talk to them though...
And to your first question - why they don't stop it? It's far easier said than done. It has to be SEEN to be stopped. They have to WANT to stop it, too. For far to long, living with minor bullying was considered "good for you" as it showed you how the world worked and helped you learn to deal with it. But, this became condoning major bullying. Heck, in far to many American High Schools, the teachers work in daily fear they'll be assaulted by the kids. I have a friend - He's a music teacher and a BIG man - who was decked by a student last year.
Anne
teachers rule and law suits
Sorry I'm not from the US and therefore my geography knowledge about the US is not that awesome ^^
I kind of wonder though... In germany the general rule for teachers and punishments and grades is:
That means if a bully victim complains they can punish those that are blamed. My school was very strictly anti-violence and it wasn't tollerated.
The problem was they didn't do anything against verbal herassment and thus I had to spend 4 years as tranny and fag of the age group...
At least it made me research what a tranny is and what a fag is and that this is no real bad thing. It wasn't too good for my gender identity though ^^
If bullying becomes too much they have to risk punishing innocents or it'll get out of hand. If someone has been beaten up they should be able to punish those the victim blames.
Can they do that in america or does the school need to fear lawsuits?
unfortunately...
In the US they most definitely would have to fear law suits if a parent could possibly have any chance at all of convincing enough people that their child was bullied by the teachers. Yep, we're that messed up.
Abigail Drew.
Um...
What happened to the student?
A teacher friend of mine had to take a fire arm from a student a while back. He changed schools after that.
LGBT teen in Buffalo, NY takes his own life
How sad
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Hatred Kills; Hatred Sells
.
Hatred kills; Hatred Sells.
The schools can't stop this. The government, the police, can't stop this. Throwing more people, more children, in jail won't stop this (we have more than enough there already).
Hatred sells. Rupert knows this well. Matt and Rush know this well. Their sponsors and broadcasters know this well.
It's not just gay children, not just gays, that get killed that way. At a "presidential" debate people cheer for the number of state murders committed in the state where I live, they cheered, and we know some of those people were innocent (YES! We do!). Some people (not all) at another national debate cheered for letting a sick man die on the street. Those cheering call themselves "right to life-ers".
It isn't just the fags that get killed by this rampant hatred. It isn't just people like me. It isn't just people like us. More infants die in the United States of America than in any other industrialized country (yes,that includes China and Russia and Brazil.) For old USAians, like me, our life expectancy is shorter than thirty-eight really first world countries. And some of us cheer keeping it that way. And those that do, call themselves "right to life-ers".
Of course, those people can exclude a child who is different from those with a right to life. Hatred sells. They need people to hate, or they would have no product.
And so should the children, only the immediate cause, be blamed for their callous jibes and jokes? Hatred sells, and all they did was buy a small bit of it. Others have bought it in ton lots. Those hateful, vile children, have heard it all else where, they were not creative; they were just repeating things they heard, or they were just doing what they had seen, excluding and ostracizing those not like them. And they, and their parents, will cry that any attempt to stop them from doing so, from showing there hatred for gays, that would be called bullying those pure and innocent children.
RIP, Jamey. I hope you're in a better place, and I'll think of you every day.
Ok this probably isn't what anyone wants on this site, but damned I'm getting pissed (though I don't hate those scared people that buy the wingnut crap - and hope I don't start too, but damn I'm pissed.), so I'm going to post anyway. Remove it when you want Erin et al.
you're absolutely right.
And sometimes, I'm honestly surprised I never once entertained a suicidal thought during grade school, whether elementary, Jr, or high school. I was despised for tons of reasons - because I was smarter, because my brain was wired differently, because I was LDS, because I wasn't having sex with every girl who'd let me, because I could easily leg press 500 pounds without effort, which translated to walking and bicycling speeds that no one else could possibly match, because despite this I was a complete Gnork and hated anything to do with sports or beating up on other people even in controlled settings, because... You get the point.
I was so completely different from absolutely everyone else in school that the only kids who REALLY accepted me for who I chose to be at that time (I was repressing my most feminine tendencies at this time), were the band geeks, who were largely almost as strange as I was.
Eventually, the people who chose to hate me learned to simply keep their distance, that getting in my face about it was liable to get them severely injured, if I didn't just storm through them like they didn't exist and keep going.
Unless they are different enough or in a way major enough to realize the importance of accepting others and banding together as the "differents", people will hate anyone not exactly like themselves. It's for some strange reason the natural hard-wiring of the human brain. We have to learn to FIGHT that tendency, and for most people, they never do.
Abigail Drew.
Kudo's Jan
You've hit the nail on the head, hate sells. Bad news sells, good things make the back page after the obituaries.
Go to a state execution, there are two groups in seperate fenced in areas, thos who disapprove of the death penalty and those who are cheering becasue some one is dying. the anti feath has very few people where as the pro death is usually a full area fillwed in with drunks and bells.
Jill Micayla
Be kinder than necessary,Because everyone you meet
Is fighting some kind of battle.
Jill Micayla
Be kinder than necessary,Because everyone you meet
Is fighting some kind of battle.
Williamsville, NY
The video showed that the student went to Williamsville North HS. I lived in Williamsville from 3rd grade to HS graduation, some summers during college, etc. If anywhere, this is my home town! I went to Wmsvl HS, which became Wmsvl South; Wmsvl North was opened while I was in college. There might be more HSs now; my parents left the area in 1977.
Williamsville is the 3rd or 4th suburb (out from) directly East of Buffalo (depending on how one counts the one city and the villages) on the old East-West state highway running from Albany/the MA border to Buffalo. It is an incorporated village in the town of Amherst, NY.
I really hate bullies and bullying.
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Ready for work, 1992.
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Bullying
A lot of the incidents I have described in my stories are real and very personal, where bullying is concerned. I got fed up of being asked "So what are you doing to cause the bullying?"
Apparently, being different as well as much, much smaller is my fault.
Oh, that and "Fight back"
Against bullies who were quite literally three times my weight.
what are you doing to cause...
I got those lines often enough myself. Usually though, instead of "Fight back" I got, "Walk away" ... probably because the times I did fight back it was like a nuclear holocaust, with me being the US, and the bullies being Japan.
The one and only time the bomb went off on school property, I got lucky and a teacher had seen everything, the bullies, on top of their severe trauma from me, were expelled from school, I got a few weeks suspension, cause of the "no violence" rule. They had to give me something, and that was the absolute minimum they could give me.
I usually did tend to just get away, but when cornered...
Abigail Drew.
I guess I was lucky
where I came from in High school the teachers were too busy smoking or drinking to be bothered with the bullies we had so we had to stop the ones that ruined things for others ourselves.
But that's when you could actually deal with something upfront. Unfortunately bullies now are more protected by law than their victims.
*Hugs*
Bailey.
Bailey Summers
Going to a boy's grammar school
I got picked on a few times but just refused to let the bullies get to me. I did get beaten once but I did go down fighting against a larger boy.
Bullying to some extent was part of the system but it wasn't as nasty as it seems to be today with kids killing themselves because of it, or perhaps we were less sensitive. A worrying trend is the number of teens killing themselves because of bullying irrespective of their being different. Then the 'trolling' of putting offensive things on web pages devoted to the dead child is really despicable - someone was sent to prison for this quite recently.
I don't know if human behaviour is getting worse or people are just declining to take responsibility for their actions, but anyone who bullies a child to the point of causing them to take their own life, should be made to pay for it.
Angharad
Angharad