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

[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.