CCSJ Blog

How Many Children Have to Die ?

How many more children have to die or be forever scarred before we realize that we have a serious problem? Perhaps the story of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, the 11 year-old boy from Springfield, Massachusetts who hanged himself can shine a big enough spotlight to wake us up. His suicide was a result of the devastating and often deadly, twin-consequences of unchecked bullying and our societal attitudes towards issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. According to the reports, Carl was mercilessly targeted and victimized on a daily basis by peers who called him “gay”, “girlie” and “fag” because he did not conform to their gender stereotype. He may or may not have been gay – at 11 years old he may not even have thought about it except for the fact that he was so tormented. And the thing is, his torment was known. Carl’s mother had tried to get his school to address the problem without success. She had another meeting scheduled at Carl’s school on the day he killed himself.

There is a notion that bullying is just some sort of childhood ‘right of passage’ that everyone goes through and gets over. It is not. As someone who is part of an organization working to address this problem I know this from experience. Bullying is at best a threat to a child’s ability to grow into an emotionally, psychologically and intellectually healthy human being. At worst, bullying leads to truancy, poor academic performance, a higher school drop-out rate, increased drug and alcohol use and retaliatory violence. Young people who are bullied are more likely to suffer from depression and attempt or actually commit suicide. And children who are gay, or who are perceived to be gay, are among the most frequent targets of bullies and often victims of the most violent forms of bullying. Such was the case last year of Lawrence King, a California teen who was shot by a classmate who thought he was gay. In this context, the words of Carl’s mother are chilling. “I have been homeless, but Carl and I made it through; I was a victim of domestic violence, and we made it through. The one thing we couldn’t get through was public school.”

When it comes to issues of diversity and inclusion, we as individuals and as a society have to do a much better job for our children of challenging bigotry and modeling respectful behavior. The issues that we struggle with in our community are the ones that inform how our children relate to one another. Race, gender, economic status, religion, sexual orientation and ability status all have deep-rooted stereotypes attached to them and still all too often determine an individual’s lot in life. Beauty and material wealth are the cornerstones of popular culture. And how we process these things, from the dinner table to the boardroom to the electoral platform to the legislature is absorbed by our children. It is no accident that when the societal focus on immigration intensified, the plight of Latino children in our schools worsened, or that when the issue of marriage for same-sex couples made the ‘front page’ it was reflected in the taunts in our school corridors.

The good news is that we can fix this. At CCSJ we do this every day and it works. We have young people in our programs who self-identify as having been bullies. We have the victims, or former victims, and we have the ones who stood by, feeling bad and not knowing what to do. And as a community, we made a start with the passing of the CMS Anti-Bullying Policy. Now we have to enforce it, through both education and sanctions. We cannot afford to wait for the news of our own Carl to surface.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=7328091&page=1

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