Bullying payout

[lederhosen]

$1 million awarded against NSW Education Department for failing to deal with bullying.

Justice Simpson found authorities "grossly failed" [Ben Cox] when he was in kindergarten and year 1 at Woodberry Public School by failing to protect him from repeated assaults, bullying and harassment by an older, disturbed student. During one attack he was "throttled" and lost consciousness, and in another had a tooth knocked out when the bully tried to make him eat his jumper.

When his mother, Angela Cox, contacted the Department of Education and complained that the school had done nothing to stop the attacks, she said she was told that "bullying builds character and [the officer, Ian Wilson] thought it was a good thing Ben got bullied".

I have no problem with the size of the payout. The kid's life has been wrecked, and it can't have made things easy for his mother either. He may have been more than usually vulnerable to bullying, but there's a reason why the 'eggshell skull' rule exists.

And with any luck, it will help the DoE and Mr. Wilson build some much-needed character.

Comments

[silverblue.livejournal.com]

I am invariably amazed at the way the torture of a child is considered to build character.

[cheshire-bitten.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, when anyone says something is character building they mean that it is inhuman and they wouldn't put up with it themselves but they wont do anything about it either.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

Please. I had a character building experience; any of the sixteen or so of us involved in this experience had the option of just leaving at any time. It was consciously choosing not to leave that built character, not just being heckled with no certain end to it.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

:::nods:::

A good few of the bullies I recall from childhood were teachers...and they incited it in kids.

Of course staff need *training* not just the provision of *'mission statements'* in dealing with school bullying.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

It continues to amaze me that people think that telling someone who is clearly distressed to 'not worry about it' helps them deal with whatever it is that they're distressed about. It then subsequently amazes me that persons who have used that phrase insist that the person who they used that phrase to could have come to them for help.

Kids who learn that adults don't help when they need it (or are dangerous in their inability to recognise distress) then take that learning into adult life. Whatever coping strategies they learn, they take with them, whether that be avoidance, violence, or whatever.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

The only thing that got my school to do anything about bullying was when I took to eye-gouging in retaliation; I guess they were fine with psychological damage, but that sort of escalation might've got them bad publicity.

I do have fond memories of the time several of the little monsters jumped me without realising my little brother was around. They were bigger and still outnumbered us, but he had a cricket bat :-)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I got in trouble every time I fought back.

Punching and strangling is fine, but you BIT him!

So he stole your things in front of the entire class and started destroying them, that was no reason to go over and wrestle them out of his grasp! You crossed the line!

Yes, they were spraying perfume on your when you got back from the hospital with that cast, but the chair you threw at them with your good arm put a scratch in the wall! Not only are you suspended, we'll charge your parents for the repairs.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

My parents called my high school to try to get them to do something about the extreme abuse(psychological, not usually physical except for spitting) that I suffered there, but the school didn't do anything. They said they hadn't noticed anything, even though the assistant principal was in fact standing right there on a few occasions when it happened. A group of perhaps twelve people would congregate outside my Spanish classroom and shout at me at the top of their lungs -- anyone in the building would have been able to hear it. Lunch was awful for me, because after lunch was when I had to go to Spanish, so I was in a state of dread.

I may sound like I'm exaggerating when I say that the treatment I endured after my family moved to that town (my middle and high school years) caused great psychological damage to me. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but you had to be there. It really was that bad.

I had previously been prone to general anxiety, but after that I developed a crippling social phobia. I remember sobbing because I believed I would never be able to make it on my own in the world; I believed I would never be able to hold down a job because I could hardly stand to talk to people I didn't know. I simply could not make telephone calls, for instance.

Although I have managed to pick myself up and now am largely normal (or at least can pass as normal) I know that some of my problems with anxiety and self-confidence are permanent relics of those years. My mother often says that she wishes she had taken legal action against the school. I think back then people weren't as aware of that possibility.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

And taking that kind of action is pretty stressful in itself.

I've probably told this story before, but the worst bullying I got (mentally, at least) was not from the kids but from the head of the science department. A friend and I won prizes in a maths competition and were invited to Parliament House to collect them; the presentation clashed with a chemistry exam so we made arrangements with the MiC-Exams to reschedule our exams.

When we got back from the presentation, Mrs. Fullaghar yelled at us for a good fifteen minutes and told us our scores on the exam wouldn't be counted - this was worth around 5% of our total grade - just before we went in to do it. Fortunately my reaction to that sort of bullying is to dig in and refuse to shift, but our parents both made sure to collar the MiC-Exams and get assurances that we wouldn't be penalised for something he'd agreed to.

She died a couple of years back, in her early fifties IIRC; I wouldn't be surprised if being perpetually angry had something to do with it.