What if we didn’t call it “bullying?” What if, instead, we called it “mean?”
Bullying is too vague, says Robin McHaelen, of True Colors, a Hartford-based nonprofit that for 18 years has worked with sexual and gender minority youth. State laws mention overt and repeated harassment, “but what does that mean?” McHaelen asks. “Do you have to see it? And if it must be repeated, how many times?”
With that as our guide, we are awash in mean.
In New York, a 30-year-old gay man and two teenagers are tortured by a group of teenagers and young adults. A Rutgers University freshman kills himself when his roommate secretly videotapes him with another man, and then streams that online. The list of our losses goes on.
The National Institute of Mental Health says that suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds. Lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and youths questioning their orientation are far more likely to think about suicide than their peers – though numbers are difficult to come by, as death certificates don’t include sexual orientation.
And where are we in all this?
Organizations such as Focus on the Family, to name one 600-pound gorilla, are fighting anti-bullying intiatives because they say such efforts are part of the thinly veiled (and entirely fictitious) “gay agenda.” Don’t look for logic behind their opposition. You won’t find it. Instead, you’ll find something that easily morphs into behavior like that of the New York torturers, or the cruel New Jersey roommate – or people like me.
Love the sinner, hate the sin is an incredibly nuanced stance to put into action. I was a good kid, a churchgoer who hung out with other churchgoers, but on the occasional weekend, we piled into a car and drove to a gay bar to shout hateful things into the open doorway, and then we’d drive off cackling.
Our respective churches told us the men at the bar were sinners of the worst kind, a theological stance that’s shaky at best. Regardless, you’d be hard-pressed to find scriptural backing for our behavior. Come Judgment Day, we will have some explaining to do.
The two groups of students who are most susceptible to bullying are kids who don’t conform to gender stereotypes, and kids who are in special education classes, McHaelen says. A new study from Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network said 61 percent of the first group of students said they felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation.
Last week, McHaelen was at another daylong training for school resource officers. Her organization trains 2,400 people a year. We need that. We also need an anti-bullying curriculum, combined with a serious look at bullying as a systemic issue. It will take more than a pamphlet, or a series of well-meaning people making videos that tell kids things will get better.
Things may well get better, but when?
In the meantime, we’re facing an army of troubled youth in a state with abysmal mental health services. The state’s child advocate, Jeanne Milstein, says her office starts fielding frantic calls from hospital emergency rooms on Friday afternoons, when, with not nearly enough services to go around, some hurting Connecticut kids are about to be left on the weekend’s doorstep.
Eric Arzubi, a resident physician in psychiatry who heads the children’s committee of Connecticut’s Keep the Promise Coalition, says that in 2008, one-fourth of Connecticut’s high school students struggled with at least one sign of depression, and one in 14 attempted suicide that year.
Arzubi says paying better attention to the mental health of our young – making services more accessible and affordable, for starters – will affect academic performances, and can help us get to the heart of our drug and alcohol issues, childhood sexual trauma, and – yes – bullying. We have work to do.
Keep the Promise Coalition will host a gubernatorial forum at 6:30 p.m., Friday at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown.
Courant staff writer and columnist Susan Campbell can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.
We tell you what’s happening, when it happens, for FREE:
|Sign-up for Breaking News Mobile Text Alerts: Text NEWS, WEATHER or TRAFFIC to 37798|
|Subscribe to our Breaking News E-mails|
|Try the News@3 Newsletter|