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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
In the wake of school shootings, state legislatures are considering laws to crack down on harassment and violence in schools. How will they tell the bullies from the victims?
Mar 15, 2001 | As hundreds of people gathered last weekend to mourn the deaths of two students at Santana High at the hands of a fellow student, Attorney General John Ashcroft mournfully revealed to the press more surprising news about the school's violence problems. It seems that the high school in Santee, Calif., was in the process of using a $123,000 Justice Department grant to study what Ashcroft described as an "onerous culture of bullying."
The grant became news because classmates of Charles Andrew Williams described the 15-year-old freshman and alleged shooter as a kid who'd been bullied to the breaking point. The description is strikingly similar to those given by friends and fellow students of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Both boys were reportedly mocked and taunted routinely and sought revenge through a deadly plan against their fellow students. News also surfaced this week that Williams had saved one bullet in the attack -- reportedly for himself.
Some of Williams' classmates insisted that he was no more tortured than any other student at the school was. The disagreement about Williams illustrates one of the chief problems with efforts to crack down on bullying: It's sometimes hard to agree on what constitutes bullying and who's behind it.
In spite of that confusion, school reformers have floated a roster of anti-bullying measures in the wake of Columbine and, now, Santana. State legislatures in Colorado, Washington and California are taking action with school safety bills that would mandate programs in local school districts to target the bullying problem. Some schools, including Santana, have also turned to a Justice Department program called Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, which provides grants to help schools study campus violence.
Santana High School faced a widespread problem with student harassment years before Williams arrived at the school. A 1997 survey taken by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department found that half of Santana's students didn't feel safe on campus, 35 percent said they had been the victims of verbal abuse or insults and 12 percent said they had been physically threatened or intimidated. More than a third said they had experienced problems directly related to race or ethnicity.
Sadly, this sounds a lot like what's going on at high schools all over the country. Despite the remarkable decrease in juvenile crime over the past decade -- culminating in the lowest juvenile homicide rate since 1983 -- students and their parents feel a great deal of fear. According to a Gallup poll taken in October, the number of teenagers involved in fights is declining, but more and more of those fights are happening at school. Two-thirds of students said fights at school were a "very big" or "fairly big" problem; 89 percent of those who had been involved in fights said they felt they had to stand up for themselves.
Increasingly, schools, states and the federal government are taking action to curb the disturbing trend.
