Community Corner

Why Bullying Is Killing Kids: National Stop Bullying Day

National Stop Bullying Day is observed on the second Wednesday of October. Here's what Patch is doing to build awareness to the problem.

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Beth Dalbey, Patch StaffVerified Patch Staff Badge
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The last moments of Channing Smith’s life had to have been more hellish than most of us can begin to fathom. The 16-year-old had told almost no one that he was bisexual — not his parents and not his classmates in his rural Tennessee community. Some kids got ahold of screenshots of what he thought was a private conversation with another boy at his school and outed him on social media.

He couldn’t face the humiliation he was sure was waiting for him at school.

He killed himself.

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Channing’s story, along with those of other kids who took their lives to escape bullying, are part of the reason Patch managers decided a couple of years ago to take on bullying as a national advocacy reporting project. Not all kids who are bullied, or even most of them, take their lives, but bullying and its online form, cyberbullying, can leave a permanent imprint on their psyches. And that’s a lot of kids: One in three are bullied.

One thing we’ve learned in our “Menace of Bullies” reporting project is that the frontal lobes of adolescent and teen brains — where reasoning and emotions are managed — aren’t fully developed. Kids who bully tend to act with little consideration or regard for the harm they are causing or how severely their victims may react.

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Bullying isn’t anything new. But for most of us who grew up 20, 30 or 40 years ago, bullying ended with the 3 o’clock school dismissal bell. Some of us — closer in lifestyle to our parents than today’s kids are to theirs — may even shrug off bullying as a rite of passage that kids eventually get over.

Today, the relatively new wrinkle of internet social media, so intertwined with how kids communicate and meet, intensifies the torment these kids feel. The hurtful scenarios playing out on their screens have all the allure of reality TV, only the online drama is more appealing because they know the people involved.

Kids who bully don’t stop to think that Channing Smith or Mallory Grossman or Rosalie Avila or too many kids to count might end their lives to escape their torment. It doesn’t occur to them that kids who are bullied can carry the burden with them throughout their lives, as many readers have told us over the course of this reporting project. They don’t know their behavior leads to truancy, or that 160,000 kids stay home from school every day to avoid them.

As adults, we don’t always remember that kids take their cues from us. They’re looking at us as role models, and too often we fail them. With every abusive comment about another made on social media or in person, we’re telling them it’s OK.

It isn’t. We have to stop this. We seriously do. Kids ought to be able to go to school without fear of being physically or emotionally tortured by their peers.

Read the full series below.

The Menace Of Bullies:
Patch Advocacy Reporting Project

As part of a national reporting project, Patch has been looking at society's roles and responsibilities in bullying and a child's unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.

Do you have a story to tell? Are you concerned about how your local schools handle bullies and their victims?

Email us at bullies@patch.com and share your views in the comments.

Selected Stories From The Project

From No Bully, Patch News Partner

From The Experts

What We've Learned

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