Thursday, April 08, 2010

USA TODAY - A 'Watershed' Case

This is a great article:

...The Mohawk Central School District in Upstate New York agreed last week to do more to protect students from harassment as part of a settlement with a 15-year-old gay teenager who said he was bullied so relentlessly he had to change schools. The district also will pay his family $50,000 and cover the cost of counseling services.

In a landmark cyber-bullying case, a California state appeals court ruled last month that free speech doesn't protect legitimate-sounding threats online. The ruling supported a lawsuit by the father of a 15-year-old whose classmates at a Westlake prep school posted death threats and anti-gay rants on the boy's website.

What's the solution? Many experts say there's no substitute for a clear, vigorously enforced school policy on bullying, supplanted by periodic training of the entire staff, from guidance counselors to teachers and lunchroom workers.

Last month, the Massachusetts House and Senate passed different versions of anti-school bullying legislation that the regional office of the Anti-Defamation League says could emerge as the nation's strongest. It would not criminalize bullying, but could mandate an anti-bullying curriculum in schools; training of teachers and staff; and reporting of potentially criminal bullying to law enforcement.

To read the whole article from the beginning go to:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-04-04-bullying_N.htm

2 comments:

Are you being bullied? said...

When will these situations and outcomes stop being swept under the rug and forgotten? Adults need to be actively watching for signs of bullying and other dangerous behavior and then they need to be willing to get involved.

handydan said...

Bullying gets worse as we become adults.

Picture a world where the bully grows up still as he or she was as a child, then hand the bully some ammunition like employee’s and a budget.

Next join a group of bullies who also have jobs, employees and budgets, we’ll call them the “Brotherhood”

Coordinate your bullying so you control things around you, like the gay man at work that is a witness against your friend in the Brotherhood. You could ask another friend at the Brotherhood to say he was sexually harassed as a child by this gay man, give him enough information to be believable then go to the Police, not just any Officer, that’s right another bully from the Brotherhood, give your statement about being assaulted as a child and poof!

The gay man is arrested sent to jail and all his computer equipment is seized as evidence, now the witness has no credibility and no evidence since his computer and back-ups were taken by the Police.

If that isn’t warning enough for our witness, and he gets out of jail on bail with a second copy of the said evidence what can we do? Call another friend from the Brotherhood but this time use one of the other crimes that are so awful they require an automatic jail sentences like DUI, Child Pornography or Domestic Disputes but now we can add to the list of automatic jail sentences because Mr. Witness is on bail. His bail conditions state, where and who he can live with, whether he can drink or not, where he can do business and what time he is allowed to be out until. Now the bully is setup for real business and Mr. Witness doesn’t even know Mr. Bully is from the same company and is behind all his bad luck.

The big question is:
Can someone use this process to make money off innocent people like Mr. Witness?

Is it possible to take millions of dollars from people in a scam but keep them completely in the dark about why and where the money went?

Remember Mr. Bully didn’t even have to get up from his chair to bully Mr. Witness.