How would police even be aware of a situation like that? I think most kids tend to internalize bullying and are unlikely to talk about it with others, much less go to the police.

I grew up in Amherst, NY. I'm not sure what makes me more ashamed, having grown up in a place where something like this can happen.. or more broadly, being human, and sharing genetic material with the people who are capable of such unchecked blind hate.

Dan, nothing will bring Jamey back. There's no anti-bullying laws in NY State, though, so I'm not sure the police could have gotten involved before this. Please keep talking about it.

I was talking this over with someone yesterday, about how it made me feel so angry & helpless, how until DOMA is repealed & GLBT people are treated the same as anyone else, there's gonna be more discrimination, some parents/churches/schools/lawmakers will pass along the message that gays are lesser, somehow, & these kinds of things will continue. & they argued it was symptomatic of the shitty education system overall, parents not being involved, etc. They refused to see the discrimination against gay people as the civil rights problem that it is.

Argh. It's true - said the former bullied bi girl - that kids can be cruel & that's a sad fact of life. Also, Jamey's mom was there for him & tried to get him help.

But the separate but equal status of GLBT people here is bullshit. IF there's no correlation between cultural attitudes towards gays & the recent spate of GLBT/perceived GLBT teen suicides, why the higher percentage rate in places like Bachmann's district? It's doubly frustrating to have the discussion with otherwise well-meaning people.

...I'm glad there's an investigation. I hope there will be charges of some sort. Those kids should know that their actions have consequences.

I hear lady Gaga wants to make bullying illegal.

It already is illegal. Criminal harrasment and death threats are a crime. You don't need to make bullying a different crime, you need to make teachers, parents and students understand that its still harrasment if it happens to a minor by other minors and it needs to be treated (and prosecuted) as such. In addition, adults in authority must understand that the laws requiring them to report child abuse if they are aware of it are not magically lifted if that abuse is coming from other children.

..and so should their parents, school & town.

Listen up, Ledyard, NY...

*Add "police" and "school administrators" to the list of adults who have to get with the program.

Today is the anniversary of Tyler Clementi's suicide, tomorrow is Asher Brown. I think we need to skip over September from now on.

Rest In Peace, kiddo.

If you can try young people as adults than charge these bullies as adults. Threats and harassment are illegal. Children should be able to get restraining orders as well.

How would police have even known about this? School administrators would be the ones who dropped the ball if they knew.

Also, I think gay leaders like you Dan need to come to terms with a tough fact. The increased presence and acceptance of gay people by the culture, media, etc at large is going to make gay kids come out sooner and sooner. And yes, the ages of 10-15 are probably the worst, cruelest, and most awful period for kids bullying for any reason.

I was bullied in Jr. High mercilously...and called a "fag". However, I didn't really know I was one yet. I'm not also quite sure those boys bullying me really thought I wanted to literally suck cock. Also, my overweight friend was teased in ways that still make me shiver (in some ways I think girls can be cruelest, I shudder to think if we'd had Facebook then). Among those insults to her was "lesbian" (as far as I know she's not/wasn't). The computer dork who played D&D was horribly bullied and called "fag" (don't think he is either). Kids in that 10-16 age bracket are quite simply some the most barbarous creatures ever.

All the progress in gay acceptance and visibility in the last 20 years is wonderful. It truly is. That said, the environment (Junior High, often in small, religious, conservative towns) the kids are realizing what/who they are (this means the bullies too) is more hostile than the old norm of a college campus.

As for the unregistered comments: yeah, cowards usually want to remain anonymous, if they can.

Just thinking about these poor kids makes me want to scream and sob in sheer frustration.

Still... convicting bullies for crimes of harassment will not help. Adolescents simply do not consider empathy or consequences before they act at this age, and they only think after they act if someone forces them to think about it. Adolescents are not adults, and we need to stop imagining that they will respond to threats of punishment and prosecution as if they were.

Also, the prospect of getting the bullies in serious trouble can deter victims (remember, kids don't think the way adults do), which won't help at all.

This is not to say that nothing should be done. Adults need to take reports of bullying seriously... by the time a student reports bullying it's probably already very serious. Support groups need to be available, and bullying needs to be discussed and addressed in schools in a way the bullies can identify with.

There also needs to be something more like counseling for the reported bullies. They need to be shown how much they are hurting someone, to be forced into empathy and to consider the consequences of their behavior. In both my experience and observations, punishing the bully only causes the bully to come down harder on the victim.

This is not because I want to be soft and forgiving to bullies, but because I remember what it was like to be bullied and I've observed it in our schools now. We need to do what works, not what will make the rest of us feel better.

references:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story…

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11…

(yes I wrote a book. Sorry, I just really care about this)

I bet if you scratch a little at the home lives of the three principle bullies, you'll find parents who make virulently homophobic statements at the dinner table. Which, of course, is why homophobic kids are more likely to be closet cases-- because their parents made it clear that gays would not be welcome in the family.

It's almost a form of child abuse. How can your kids live happy lives if you twist them up to be violent, hateful little shits?

Still crying for Jamey and the rest of the dead / hurting kids in this 'free country'

I'm glad this topic is finally getting more attention but it bears repeating that bullies don't just target gay or "gay-seeming" kids, bullies target everyone. I went to grade school and junior high in the late 60s and early 70s. I am a straight female, so what the bullies zeroed in on for me was my short stature and my speech impediment (which was eliminated with years of speech therapy). Bullies can sense when their victim is "meek" and won't fight back, but internalizes everything. I was teased constantly, they even followed me home, teasing me all the way. By Junior High it was so bad I was having anxiety attacks and severe stomach pains and didn't want to go to school. When I was about 14 I decided I couldn't take it anymore and started sneaking pills from my parents' medicine cabinet, trying to stash away enough to eventually kill myself. What eventually saved me was not only the thought of how hard it would be on my loving, supportive parents if I died, but around this time I started getting into music in a big way, and the album "Quadrophenia" literally saved my life. Really. I now have two grown children and when my son was much younger he started getting teased because he didn't like sports. And my son was saved by Nirvana. I guess it runs in the family. Bullies have been around forever, it's not a new phenomenon. And it has always seemed that the families of bullies, who apparently don't regard child rearing as a very important job, never taught their kids about acceptance, never taught them to be respectful and kind. And that's a damn shame.

My parents live in East Amherst NY and are active in the community.

Here's some things they've mentioned:
- The whole community is very very concerned about this. OMG.
- Because a lot is on written and online record, it's very clear who was bullying him, they were a small group of identifiable bullies. The police are currently investigating to see if they can lay criminal charges, including prosecuting this either as harrassment or AS A HATE CRIME.
- The police chief in the Buffalo News stated clearly that, while there's insufficient evidence to say bullying led directly to suicide, nonetheless, the bullies may have been committing crimes for which they could be prosecuted successfully.
- The school has lots of anti-bullying curriculum already. Middle schoolers say things like, "yeah, we talk about bullying *all the time* at school." It's a progressive community with the general idea from the authority figures that bullying is Not Okay. But this still happened anyway.
- The LGBT community is going to stage a march about this.
- He has lots of posts on his journal and youtube. Watch them if you're ok with sobbing your eyes out.

Prosecuting or suing people after the fact won't being any of these victims back, so unless it can be shown that doing so will help prevent bullying in the future, there's little point.

And I doubt it will. Why not? Wingedkat is right -- adolescents simply don't consider empathy or consequences. Why? Because they haven't learned to yet. Except for a few sociopaths, most of them will eventually grow into responsible adults after they do learn.

Maybe the answer isn't so much in "targeting" bullying per se, but to revamp the educational curriculum to better teach kids about basic human nature -- that even ordinary people can sometimes do horrible things. I learned about the Holocaust in early high school, but not the famous Milgram experiment on obedience to authority until college. That one stayed with me for weeks. I eventually realized that the best way to inoculate people against behaving the same way is to make them aware of that experiment.

There are published psychological experiments on peer pressure; why not teach some of the better ones starting in junior high? Better yet, design some good experiments for the students themselves.