Bully for Long Beach

The front page story in today's Newsday is about the epidemic bullying in Long Island schools. It features four kids willing to speak on the record about their torment, and two of the four are from Long Beach High School. Reading it made me just want to cry.

I can easily imagine that for a teenager, being bullied at school could well be worse than being bullied at home. Teenagers identify more closely with their friends than with their families, and peer-rejection must be a pain that traumatizes a teen like no other. It is a kind of sociopathy that is unforgiveable, because it robs its victims of their last few years of childhood and scars them for life.

Each of the kids who spoke for the article alerted their schools to their problem, and despite the schools' policy-appropriate actions (detention for the bullies, workshops for the student bodies at large), the harrassment continues. The family of one of the kids decided to withdraw him from school altogether until they can move to another district. The two 10th graders from Long Beach are starting an anti-bullying club together. Good for them!  But in the meantime, the torture continues.

Who gives these torturers their power? Who allows them to perpetuate their singular cruelty?  We do. We tsk, tsk and applaud the schools for acknowledging the problem and their efforts to sensitize students and faculty to this insidious form of gang-war. What we don't do is demand drastic and immediate action.

The first line of defense for parents of kids being bullied is certainly to allow the educational system to exert its influence. But the kids profiled in Newsday describe literally years of abuse that the schools have been powerless to stop, despite their best efforts. It seems to me that families in this situation should be willing to endure ineffectiveness for only so long before taking matters into their own hands.

A formal police complaint would be one way to let the bully's parents know that you are not willing to watch your child suffer in silence.Civil action against the bully's family would be another way to get their attention, and potentially hit them where it hurts most -- in their checkbook. Criminal action would be entirely warranted, in my opinion, if only bullying were officially classified as a criminal act.

Since unfortunately it's not (yet), we are still reliant on the schools to put a stop to this wholly unacceptable behavior. Instead of ineffectual lectures from the dean, bullies should be segregated from the rest of the student population in class. Instead of after-school detention, they should be suspended. Bullies should not be permitted to circulate among our children, and as evidenced by the four brave students willing to share their stories in Newsday, drastic action is needed to turn the advancing tide before the land is flooded.