so so thankful that myspace, facebook, twitter, etc were not around when i was in jr high and high school. there needs to be laws protecting minors from internet slander, bullying and descrimination.

i think they should sue the parents in a civil court for providing and not monitoring their children’s acivities online. these bullies cannot buy computers and cell phones without the help of parents. technology is a priviledge if you are under 18. i think sueing the parents will set a standard to hold people accountable for the slanderous material that is spread about minors on the internet.

Re bullying: One important part of this to be addressed is the groupthink that allows situations to escalate. It is very easy for young people to get pressured or persuaded into going along with something that starts small but spirals out of control. I think young people need to be made aware that something that seems harmless at first can very easily become hurtful and/or violent, particularly when the something is done in a group as opposed to a one-on-one situation.

The traagedy that happened in So.Hadley has once again brought the focus on bullying behavior. When looking at solutions, research tells us the best way to eliminate the problem is with school-wide systemic programs that is ongoing. One time events to talk about bullying are helpful but they do not change the climate that supports and even encourages the behavior.

Re: Today’s report on bullying

Listening to the program today, I was irritated by the reporter’s emphasis on the word “beautiful” when introducing the sad story of victim Phoebe Prince–as if this case were all the more tragic because of the victim’s looks and the loss all the more profound. ALL victims of bullying-driven violent deaths were beautiful–just ask the people who loved them.

One other point: to the reporter, the noun is “bully”, not “bully-er”–used more than once during the broadcast. Other than that, this was a compelling and well-researched report.

Your piece on bullying hit home with me. I was physically terrorised in junior high school, and I well remember the feeling of complete helplessness and isolation that it created. I never reported the bullying to teachers because I feared that nothing would be done, and I would then be exposed to even more savage attacks. My parents had some idea what was going on but did not know what to do in the face of a school culture that tended to view this as a normal part of school life.

For girls, physical attack is somewhat less of an issue (although clearly it exists too), but my female peers in 1960’s England had instead chiefly to deal with the old lie “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”, which made any negative response to the deeply cruel verbal abuse of which girls are so capable into “weakness”.

Few things make me as angry as hearing about bullying, and I most heartily agree that it it has to be taken very seriously indeed by adults. I also agree that it is certainly a learned behavior that mostly comes from the home environment. Thanks for this important piece, and for highlighting programs to reduce this scourge.

We are spending less than $25.00 per homeless in the US and more than $33.00 per Haitian. Is this fair? Not to mention its 70 degrees in Haiti and near 0 degrees in the northeast with a blizzard in the Central East coast. I think we need to focus on our growing homeless problem. There are 1.6 million US citizens homeless in the US.

Thank you for the piece on bullying. Bullying among children and teens is a serious problem and I agree with Ms. Coloroso that we ignore it or downplay it at our kids’ peril. Thankfully, I think that our understanding of this issue is continuing to evolve and develop in the right direction. This is important because children who bully grow up to be adults who bully. They bully at home, they bully in social settings, and they bully in the workplace. So, bullying by adults is something that must be studied, addressed, managed and understood more deeply. While bullying by children and the types of adult bullying I’ve mentioned here are more in the peer-on-peer relational setting, one interesting area of research is something called contrapower bullying, where a person in a seemingly lower power position bullies a person in a higher ranking position. For instance, a recent national study by Dr. Claudia Lampman (a Professor of Psychology at the University of Alaska Anchorage) has found that there is a serious problem with students engaging in bullying behavior with faculty at colleges and universities across the country. This might make an interesting subject for a future broadcast. No matter where it occurs, bullying is something that must be better understood for everyone’s health and safety.

If these Tea Party people were really concerned about deficits and debt, why did they not organize during the record breaking Republican budgets from Lincoln to Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush? In truth this movement is about racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, the Republican Party, and corrupt corporations inciting angry trailer trash–all unsuccessfully disguised under a thin layer of reasonable concerns.

I was deeply moved by your well researched piece on bullying. I am the mother of an eight-year old son who began to be bullied in kindergarten, by kindergartners! While most of the documentation focuses on older children, the behavior begins much sooner. The strategies of deceit begin much younger than you would believe as well so it often not obvious. One of the interventions that began to show results with us was to involve the whole disconnected community – school administers, teachers, aides on the playgrounds and cafeterias, after-school programs, all working together. My son felt supported and kids began to rally among each other. Bullying comes in many not so obvious forms at different ages and if children are not educated about it starting in kindergarten it quickly creeps into their lives in and out of the school.