The real Mean Girls...

Well, bullying is quite an universal thing. And school is probably the worse breeding ground, as the supervision is nil, as the article denounce.

Stuff like this make my decision to throw caution to the wind and beat up the first one who tried to bully me in high school seem like one of the better decisions of my life, despite the suspension I got.

Strange but true fact: I was bullied by 4 specific people in my life, mainly from 9th grade to 11th grade. 3 of those 4 people all had some kind of traffic accident within 18 months of me graduating from HS. Two of them were killed, and one is permanently brain damaged. The fourth person, who was a big football "star" in high school, gained 150 lbs and was on his third marriage by the time our 10 year reunion rolled around.

Lesson: Don't fuck with me.

Kids are the worst. Seriously, I've never in my life inflicted or incurred as much pain as when I was young. Kids can be fucking scum.

Black magic from deep space.



But seriously, yeah, shit makes me pretty damn furious too. I think it's even worse nowadays though, since the bullying doesn't stop at school. It follows kids home via social networking websites, and in this case they were hitting her with text messages too it seems.

I count myself lucky as I don't remember really ever being bullied in highschool. Still, it's times like this that you wish you were able to jump back into your teen self with the maturity you have now to deal with the shit you saw back then.

You didn't happen to own a 1958 Plymouth Fury at the time, did you?

Duddits?

Nah. Although my Senior year, besides the fact that I had gotten a little bigger (I was a skinny shit for most of my school years), a friend introduced me to heavy metal music over the summer, and I grew my hair long and came to school in the fall blaring "Shout at the Devil" and was wearing metal t-shirts. So a lot of these guys went from pushing me around and calling me "fag" to avoiding me and calling me "devil-worshipper", which was fine with me. The funny thing was, I had a ton of friends in school, ones that I had been in school with since kindergarten. But most these guys didn't start going to our school until we started high school, but the guy that was the athlete was one of my best friends in middle school.

One last anecdote--when we had Honors Day in my Senior year, I was one of the folks that got to sit in the "Honors" group in the middle of the gym instead of on the bleachers. When people were filing in, one of the aforementioned bullies came over to me and said, "Excuse me, I think you're in my seat." I replied with a laugh, and said, "Not on your best fucking day." All his friends laughed, and he grabbed my shirt like he was going to threaten me, and I said, "Go ahead. Punch me in front of every teacher and administrator in this school and then get held back yet another year. Do something smart for once in your life and go sit down." And he did, thank god.

And then you walked to the podium and proclaimed, "I love you, Beth Cooper."

My life isn't that interesting. Although with a few tweaks, maybe there's a book in there somewhere. Maybe I can make some strange quasi-biographical movie where all my enemies die, and then I get the prom queen at the end. I could call it "Carey".

I know you're holding this up as divine retribution or the presence of justice in the universe, but I kind of like to think you're an insanely vindictive and obsessive type who sabotaged both those cars and systematically destroyed the other's marriage and body by adding high amounts of fattening and tasteless agents to his food.

Statutory rape??? What were these girls doing?

Poor Phoebe Prince. She would have made a good superheroine.

One of the kids arrested was an 18 year old. I'd assume that was the girl's boyfriend. And because our legal system is occasionally dumb, he gets sent up for screwing around with a 15 year old.

Am I the only thinking this sounds a bit douchy?

Never understood that. As if an 18-year old high school kid doesn't have enough to worry about without IDing every girl in the school.

Seems to me that if you're 18 but still in high school, the statutory rape law shouldn't apply to you.

Sorry for the derail, but that's the dumbest fucking thing ever.

So a 17 year old high school senior who is dating a 16 year old high school junior suddenly becomes a criminal when he turns 18 in January? That's the nonsensical thing to me.

17 and 16 is a big leap from 18 and 15, sir. And I never said it shouldn't be looked at on a case-by-case basis. But to just say it shouldn't apply at all? That's just awful.

Can't say I disagree with Dickson. 18's a legally fucking tricky year to be in high school in our current system, and the fact that you can be arrested for dating someone you go to the same school with is, was, and always will be bullshit.

It just seems dumb to me to tell someone that something that wouldn't have been looked at twice a year ago is now some kind of crime even though both people are still in high school, all because someone hit a birthday. I'm not saying give all 18-years olds carte blanche, but if it's an existing relationship, I don't think the older party should be legally obligated to break up with their partner because they got a year older.

On the other hand, most 18-year-old boys are paint-huffing cretins who think with their dicks and ought not to breed.

That's a far-cry from what you're saying now. And in your current context, I tend to somewhat agree with you (again, on a case-by-case basis), but there's no way in hell an 18 year old has any business dating a 15 year old in general.

But legally, a 17 year old dating a 14 year old is A-OK. That's where my disconnect is coming from.

EDIT: That's, of course, assuming that as long as both parties are minors, statutory rape doesn't come into play. Not sure if it matters if one person is under 16 though.

You're working off the assumption that 18 year olds are so much smarter and more mature than a 15 year old. They're not.

Teenagers hooking up due to raging hormones and little else is par for the course. And it's pretty much unavoidable if you're in the same working environment day after day and the exact moment your sexuality switch gets flipped. Whether or not they're over or under the imaginary line is meaningless in that scenario.

You know when that statutory rape law should slip into this conversation? When the guy rapes her.

Eh, the teenage mind isn't developed enough to really give what the law requires of consent, it's one of the reasons we have a juvenile court system. I think it makes sense to say that certain people can't meaningfully consent to sex even when the act is "consensual."

Bullying in schools takes many different forms, but there always seems to be one universal factor: complaints to administrators are routinely ignored. I have never really been able to fathom why this is so prevalent. Do the situations seem "icky?" Are teachers too busy in private lunch rooms to take an interest? Before anyone can concentrate on learning anything, they need to feel some semblance of physical and mental/emotional safety. It's pretty fundamental to the job of the folks running the schools.

True, but our system seems to think that once you're 18, you level up, you get your +1 Blade of Adult Decision Making, +6 to Wisdom, and this socially cuts you off from everybody a year or more younger than you. Anyone who's spent 5 minutes with your average college freshman can testify this is not the case.

One word: Lawsuits. Its way too easy for parents to complain, sue the Board of Education, or get a good teacher fired if they believe that teacher is getting *too* involved in the life of a child, and that very thing happens, and often. The closer you get to becoming a teacher, the more the advice becomes that there are certain things it's legally prudent to ignore, and maybe leave for the school's therapist to take care of.

Plus, these days, there's a very real chance a student could decide to go after a teacher.

He caused the car accidents via the crafty placement of a fake fire hydrant.

No, I'm working off the assumption that the level-headed, respectful 18-year-old male is the minority and that the testosterone-riddled douchebag whose aspirations aim no higher than fucking as many chicks as he can and will say WHATEVER it takes to a naive, impressionable girl in the most emotionally confusing time of her life in an effort to get her panties off needs to be fucking held accountable.

Also - you are aware that there is a fundamental difference between statutory rape and rape, yeah?

Words hurt. I got lucky that I wasn't bullied, but I've damn sure seen shit like this. A girl in my high school named Liz so hated her ex-friend Nicole (who committed the cardinal sin of liking her friend's ex-boyfriend) that she harassed her daily, turned people against her, and wrote CUNT in big letters on the back of Nic's prom dress with a Sharpie at our junior prom. Nic transferred to another school for her senior year.

Anybody who says, "Oh just ignore it" is a dumbass. You can't ignore someone who is in your face five days a week for four years.

The question/problem is, was that kid more or less accountable for his actions when he was 17?

Oh God, yes.

For what it's worth, I don't care what age the girl is, the second she cries rape, that shit needs to be taken seriously. I just don't think that rape is implied thing if its between a sophomore and a senior in high school, and the girl never says anything to the effect of coercion.

My biggest issue is that a half decent sexual education program or awesome parents would enforce what consent means early enough to make this less of a moral gray area.

For this most tragic of incidents, I'm going to break my remarks down into two separate categories. The first will deal with how this effects Massachusetts as a whole, while the second will deal exclusively with the phenomena of highschool bullying


1) This is a dark day for Massachusetts and in a year that already saw Scott Brown elected to the Senate, it comes as yet another reminder that the work of perfecting our union and commonwealth is far from over.

I must wonder though if some of the media firestorm is just a consequence of the fact that people love to kick Massachusetts when we're down. To this day, members of the press unironically refer to our great commonwealth as "Taxachusetts", despite the fact that taxes are lower here than in more than half the states in the nation.. The bullying thing was the number one story on CNN yesterday, and with all the problems facing our nation the microscope that has been turned on South Hadley reeks of that "pregnancy pact" thing in Quincy last year, where the media freaked out over a hoax and slandered the state's good name in the process

Anyway....

2) To my everlasting shame, I must confess that I bullied other girls in highschool. I wasn't as bad as these people apparently were, but I'd had a lonely childhood with few friends, so as soon as I secured popularity and status as a "cool" person in Highschool/middleschool, I did everything I could to hang on to it. Tragically this included the systematic harassment of certain individuals for a large part of my highschool career. My insults were more clever and comical than out right cruel (IMHO), but I did purposely single out the people who I knew were least equipped to endure the torrent of nastiness I directed their way

I feel like shit about it to this day.

I did specifically go out of my way to directly and personally apologized, in full, to each of the people I picked on before graduation. I explicitly said that my cruelty was entirely about issues that I was dealing with and not faults held by them

They all forgave me and seemed sort of genuinely stunned and surprised that I cared that much. If I'd ended up pushing someone to the point where they took their own life.. that would be a hard thing to live with, and I do not envy the South Hadley nine. They're going to have to deal with that guilt for the rest of their lives.


Ok, that's all I have to say about this.

Yeah, this is certainly a problem, but it seems to me (from a completely uneducated position on the matter, so I'll concede to anyone with actual experience in the matter) that if a teacher saw something like this and actually gave a damn (which, sadly, isn't the case in a lot of situations), then there are several options that they can take short of stepping in themselves. You can contact the offending child's parents, or, if that proves to be fruitless, contact the VICTIM'S parents and make sure they know the full extent of what's going on, in case the student themselves is afraid of talking about it. Again, maybe I don't have the right perspective, but "We're not allowed to do anything!" REALLY feels like a copout.

I just use to hit the fuckers tell the left me alone, it a family tradition. My father cousin once complain to my grandmother about being bullied. My grandmother gave her nephew two choices get switched by her, or go face the bully. He went, and beat up said bully. My granny was one hard woman.

Teachers aren't paid enough to give a shit.

I don't think it a matter of pay. It just not their Job.

Two things -

1) As far as statutory rape laws go, they're actually even wonkier than many of you realize - here in Michigan (as well as other states) we have the "two year" statute, which basically makes underage kanoodling okay as long as the two involved are separated by no more than two years of age. This has led to 16 and 17 year olds incarcerated in the adult penal system for stat rape because the ages were off by a year, and having to register as sex offenders. Something strikes me as a little "off" about this arrangement.

2) Dealing with bullying is incredibly tricky business. Not too long ago my six year old came home with a scratch on his forehead; when asked about it he said that some classmates of his beat him up during recess, pinning him down and repeatedly slamming his head into the ground. The missus and I were both horrified by this, especially considering he said it happened daily. She immediately wanted to file a police report and string up every last one of these hooligans; I opted for contacting the school and getting to the bottom of this at the source. I went in, spoke to the principal, got a more rounded version of events when each of the kids involved were brought forward to describe what happened (no extended abuse, isolated incident of rough horseplay, all but one of the kids fingered even had anything to do with him being hurt), apologies and punishments were handed out all around, and things were pretty much settled. Regardless, my over-protective wife HATED me for taking this approach, equating it to apologizing for these thugs. When an unrelated incident cropped up a week later where he was bit by some other kid who was jealous over him winning some classroom game she lashed out at me that this was a continuation of a slippery slope - "What if he ends up in the hospital next? What will you do then?"

Mind you, this is KINDERGARTNERS I'm talking about here, not to mention I managed to avoid getting mixed up with the parents of the other kids in this, which adds even more emotional, reactive tension to this shit. I can't imagine how bad it'll be when my kids are in high school - I'm sure as shit not looking forward to it.

If thinking people with alliterative names make good superheros is douchey, well then... Stan Lee is the biggest douche in the universe.

Don't worry. Martin Savage is a stupid, horrible human being. Ignore him. Ironically, he is in fact an internet bully.

THE CYCLE CONTINUES.

Actually, I just painted a fake tunnel on a mountainside and then painted the dividing lines to divert the road into the fake tunnel. Amazing that it worked multiple times.

We need to let Domingo back so he can post, "It's a Ginger."

Now I'm not against rape accusations being ignored but the Duke Rape case and many, many instances of false accusations that occur every year warrant that seriousness being applied to both parties. These "regret" accusations ruin the lives of young men in ways that are irreparable in most cases. I'm hoping that your admonition to take accusations seriously also encompasses the damage that can be wrought by a false accusation.

Well I guess it was just a bad joke. It's just that most of Stan Lee's character aren't real girls who just killed themselves.

It's a terrible superhero name - no phonetic alliteration.

Oh boo hoo, I feel so bad for those Duke kids.

You know what I say to that? Tough.

No, he isn't. A bit assy maybe, but not stupid and horrible.