Speaker: 'Students, Parents and Schools Must Work Together to Stop Bullies'

The other kids at Carl Walker Hoover's school kept calling him gay.

They tormented him and he couldn't get them to stop.

So he found another way to make it stop.

Carl killed himself.

"He was age 11," Paula C. Rodriguez-Rust, Ph.D., a sociologist and bullying educator told a group of Point Borough parents and district staff members at a Thursday night forum about bullying at the borough high school. "We really have to start talking to young people about to talk to each other.

"Calling someone gay is a very common insult," Rodriguez-Rust told the group, in front of a large image of Carl Walker Hoover on a giant screen on the auditorium stage.

The young, handsome boy's big, bright eyes were lit up, with an ear-to-ear grin to match. He wore a football uniform and looked like a normal, happy kid who couldn't wait to hit the field.

But if Carl was happy when the photograph was shot, he didn't stay that way. The relentless torture of verbal bullying became too much for him and now he's gone.

Rodriguez-Rust said the "you're gay" insult is used by many different age groups, including some so young they may not even fully understand the actual definition of "gay."

But they know that calling someone that is a way to hurt someone, she said.

Rodriguez-Rust, a university professor who has written and spoken extensively about how to help prevent and address bullying, told the group that the entire school community of students, parents and administrators have to work together to create a school climate where bullying isn't tolerated and isn't cool.

The community needs to work together to get kids past the point where they are afraid to stick up for victims of bullying and afraid to report offenses.

"You need to tell your child," Rodriguez-Rust told the group, "that even though their friend who is being bullied told them to not tell anyone, the deeper message is they were saying, 'Help me,' and you need to tell someone so they get help."

Kids also need to be taught not to "hit back," Rodriguez-Rust said.

"That might work sometimes on the street," she said. "But not in school. The schools can't allow that. So if you're telling your child to hit back, you're putting them in a very difficult position because you're telling them to do something that's not allowed in school. And it doesn't work. It only makes the situation escalate."

The proliferation of Internet use on hand-held devices, as well as computers, has empowered bullies, making it a lot easier for them to spread their message quickly to a large audience.

Rodriguez-Rust talked about one high school girl who had sent her boyfriend a sexually-explicit photo of herself. They broke up and the boyfriend sent it to the entire school.

The girl killed herself.

Rodriguez-Rust, who is also the mother of four children, ages 10 to 15, said it's important for parents to explain to their kids that the content they post to the Internet, including Facebook, My Space and other social networking sites, or cell phones, will probably be there forever, and could, potentially, be sent anywhere.

Kids also need to understand that a sexually-explicit photo is child pornography, even when minors take photos of themselves. So having the photo is being in possession of child pornography and sending the photo via a computer or hand-held device is transmitting child pornography. Both of those are crimes, she said.

The speaker explained that now that there is a new state bullying law, the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, there is so much talk in schools and in the media about bullying, that the word is getting over-used and misused. And that's dangerous, she said, because the way to address bullying is different than the way to address other types of bad behavior.

The new law requires schools to report and address bullying in specific ways, she noted.

"If we use the word wrong, it might obligate the school to respond in an inappropriate way," Rodriguez-Rust said.

She said bullying is when one or more persons are hurting someone, it's usually unprovoked and usually repeated.

"It's not mutual, it's not reciprocal," she said. "In bullying, there's a power imbalance. Some people use their popularity as power, their social power, to control or manipulate.

"Emotional bullying can be just as devastating as as physical bullying, maybe even more so," Rodriguez-Rust said. "And a threat itself can be very harmful. Sometimes kids say, 'Yeah, I threatened him. But I just said that. I wasn't going to do that.' "

But threats are bullying and can have devastating consequences, she said.

Racist, biased, anti-gay, or derogatory remarks, or using social power to exclude certain kids from relationships and social gatherings, are all bullying, Rodriguez-Rust noted.

And bullying even goes on in X-Box and other video games.

"It's called griefing," she noted. "A player has the right to report someone who is communicating in an inappropriate way.

"But, sometimes, a group playing a game will report someone who has done nothing wrong. So if you get an email that your child's X-Box account has been cancelled, it might not be their fault."

Rodriguez-Rust said students with physical or mental challenges are more vulnerable to bullying because they may appear to be different from other students and it's often harder for them to make friends, which means they're more alone, also making them natural targets for bullies who are usually cowards.

For example, there have been many cases of students with Asperger's, a type of autism, who have become victims of bullies because they may look or communicate differently than other children.

Asperger's syndrome "is a developmental disorder that affects a person's ability to socialize and communicate effectively with others," according to the Mayo Clinic web site. "Children with Asperger's syndrome typically exhibit social awkwardness and an all-absorbing interest in specific topics."

Rodriguez-Rust also took questions from the audience. It quickly became clear that some of the parents in the room have children who have either been victims of bullying or who have been accused of bullying.

One mother of three sons said her two youngest, who are 10 and 14, are constantly bullied, the younger one on the school bus and the older one at the high school. She stayed after the meeting to talk to school officials.

Other parents asked how the district investigates bullying.

Schools Superintendent Vincent Smith said, "We take it very seriously and always have, long before this law was passed."

He said teachers and administrators, some of whom are anti-bullying specialists who have been trained by Rodriguez-Rust and state officials to address bullying, work together to investigate accusations of bullying.

Parents can tell teachers or principals who will investigate and, ultimately, all reports of bullying must be sent to Smith's office.

"If there's an issue, let us know about it," he said.

Resources for more information: see the bottom of the borough school district web site home page for links to the district's bullying policy and to contact information for staff members trained to help prevent and address bullying; spectrumdiversity.org, the website maintained by Rodriguez-Rust; Alliance for Comprehensive and Effective Strategies for Bullying and Prevention, with a free, downloadable handbook on how to combat bullying and information about professionals qualified to help schools and families learn how to help prevent and address bullying; Abilitypath.org, for support for parents of children with special needs; rword.org, a website urging society to no longer use the word "retarded";"Look Me in the Eye," a book by John Elder Robison, about his struggles growing up with Asperger's syndrome; and netlingo.com, a website to help parents translate the texting acronym widely used by children, some as young as second or third grade.