Bullying by any other name ...

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: Law & Justice

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BULLYING HAS become a much-talked-about topic in Baltimore City and throughout the state of Maryland as well as the country at large. There is a general concern, as incidents of bullying have resulted in much publicized threats of suicide--and an actual suicide in South Hadley, Mass., of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old who hanged herself, apparently unable to live with the cringing fear caused by her classmates' months of bullying. Parents in Massachusetts contend, as has been traditional in bullying-at-schools meetings, that their complaints had been minimized and ignored by school administrators.

At about the same time in Baltimore, an eight-year-old student with cerebral palsy threatened to kill herself as a result of harassment and worse by her classmates at Gilmor Elementary School. Shaniya Boyd's affliction was grist for her monstrous bullying, including on the day of the worst assault, as her mother Geneva Biggus described it, according to The Baltimore Sun, her daughter "was teased, knocked off the crutches she uses to walk, and repeatedly kicked in the forehead."

Bullying also can be manifest in subtler and mole difficult-to-detect forms. One should not be naive regarding some complexities of what bullying is, including threatening or covertly intimidating messages sent through Internet social networking. This component again argues for due diligence in assessing the problem and articulating roles and laws to combat it.

More and more citizens are speaking openly of the problem as a serious threat to the safety and well-being of innocent schoolchildren. Maryland First Lady Katie O'Malley even has declared a "Maryland Bullying Awareness and Prevention Week." She maintains that bullying is preventable, stressing a more aggressive posture, including, as described in "A Message from the Governor" e-mailed to interested citizens, that "nontolerance" should be emphasized. Schools across the state appear to have taken up the challenge--with the level of serious resolution as yet undetermined--through a variety of activities that make concern about bullying more salient and part of schools' active agenda.

In an op-ed piece in The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore County Schools CEO Andres A. Alonso wrote the following, after referring to victims threatening suicide as a result of bullying as an "incident": "The reflexive response to school-based bullying is often to exclude the bully. That doesn't work. Last year, the Baltimore...