Words That Wound

By Kathleen Vail
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Kathleen Vail was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from California University of
Pennsylvania. She has worked as an education reporter at daily newspapers in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia, and in 1994
she became an assistant editor at the American School Board Journal: The Source for School Leaders. She has been managing editor
there since 2006. Vail lives in Springfield, Virginia, with her husband and two sons.
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Brian Head saw only one way out. On the final day of his life, during economics class, the fifteen-year-old stood
up and pointed a semiautomatic handgun at himself. Before he pulled the trigger, he said his last words, “I
can’t take this anymore.”
Brian’s father, William Head, has no doubt why his child chose to take his life in front of a classroom full of
students five years ago. Brian wanted everyone to know the source of his pain, the suffering he could no longer
endure. The Woodstock, GA, teen, overweight with thick glasses, had been systematically abused by school
bullies since elementary school. Death was the only relief he could imagine. “Children can’t vote or organize,
leave or run away,” says Head. “They are trapped.”
For many students, school is a torture chamber from which there is no escape. Every day, 160,000 children stay
home from school because they are afraid of being bullied, according to the National Association of School
Psychologists. In a study of junior high school students from small Midwestern towns, nearly 77 percent of the
students reported they’d been victims of bullies at school — 14 percent saying they’d experienced severe
reactions to the abuse. “Bullying is a crime of violence,” says June Arnette, associate director of the National
School Safety Center. “It’s an imbalance of power, sustained over a period of time.”
Yet even in the face of this suffering, even after Brian Head’s suicide five years ago, even after it was revealed
this past spring that a culture of bullying might have played a part in the Columbine High School shootings i,
bullying remains for the most part unacknowledged, underreported, and minimized by schools. Adults are
unaware of the extent and nature of the problem, says Nancy Mullin-Rindler, associate director of the Project
on Teasing and Bullying in the Elementary Grades at Wellesley College Center for Research for Women. “They
underestimate the import. They feel it’s a normal part of growing up, that it’s character-building.”
Bullying doesn’t have to result in death to be harmful. Bullying and harassment are major distractions from
learning, according to the National School Safety Center. Victims’ grades suffer, and fear can lead to chronic
absenteeism, truancy, or dropping out. Bullies also affect children who aren’t victimized: Bystanders feel guilty
and helpless for not standing up to the bully. They feel unsafe, unable to take action. They also can be drawn
into bullying behavior by peer pressure. “Any time there is a climate of fear, the learning process will be
compromised,”says Arnette.
A full 70 percent of children believe teachers handle episodes of bullying “poorly,” according to a study by John
Hoover at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. It’s no wonder kids are reluctant to tell adults about
bullying incidents. “Children feel no one will take them seriously,” says Robin Kowalski, professor of psychology
at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, who’s done research on teasing behavior.
Martha Rizzo, who lives in a suburb of Cincinnati, calls bullying the “dirty little secret” of her school district.
Both her son and daughter were teased in school. Two boys in her son’s sixth-grade class began taunting him
because he wore sweatpants instead of jeans. They began to intimidate him during class. Once they knocked
the pencil out of his hand during a spelling test when the teacher’s back was turned. He failed the test. Rizzo
made an appointment with the school counselor. The counselor told her he could do nothing about the
behavior of the bullies and suggested she get counseling for her son instead. “Schools say they do something,
but they don’t, and it continues,” says Rizzo. “We go in with the same problem over and over again.”
Anna Billoit of Louisiana went to her son’s middle school teachers when her son, who had asthma and was
overweight, was being bullied by his classmates. Some of the teachers made the situation worse, she says. One
male teacher suggested to her that the teasing would help her son mature. “His attitude was, ‘Suck it up, take it
like a man,’” says Billoit.
Much bullying goes on in so-called transition areas where there is little or no adult supervision: hallways, locker
rooms, restrooms, cafeterias, playgrounds, buses, and bus stops. When abuse happens away from adult eyes,
it’s hard to prove that the abuse occurred. Often, though, bullies harass their victims in the open, in full view of
teachers and other adults. Some teachers will ignore the behavior, silently condoning ii. But even when adults
try to deal with the problem, they sometimes make things worse for the victim by not handling the situation
properly. Confronting bullies in front of their peers only enhances the bullies’ prestige and power. And bullies
often step up the abuse after being disciplined. “People know it happens, but there’s no structured way to deal
with it,” says Mullin-Rindler. “There’s lots of confusion about what to do and what is the best approach.”
Societal expectations play a part in adult reactions to childhood bullying. Many teachers and administrators
buy into a widespread belief that bullying is a normal part of childhood and that children are better off working
out such problems on their own. But this belief sends a dangerous message to children, says Head. Telling
victims they must protect themselves from bullies shows children that adults can’t and won’t protect them.
And, he points out, it’s an attitude adults would never tolerate themselves. “If you go to work and get slapped
on the back of the head, you wouldn’t expect your supervisor to say, ‘It’s your problem — you need to learn to
deal with it yourself,’ ” says Head. “It’s a human rights issue.”
Yet, changes are coming. This past April the Georgia State Legislature passed an anti-bullying law. The law
defines bullying as “any willful attempt or threat to inflict injury on another person when accompanied by an
apparent present ability to do so” or “any intentional display of force such as would give the victim reason to
fear or expect immediate bodily harm.” Schools are required to send students to an alternative school if they
commit a third act of bullying in a school year. The law also requires school systems to adopt anti-bullying
policies and to post the policies in middle and high schools.
William Head, who has become a crusader against bullying after his son’s death, was consulted by the state
representatives who sponsored the bill, but he believes the measure won’t go far enough. He urges schools to
treat bullying behavior as a violation of the state criminal law against assault, stalking, and threatening and to
call police when the law is broken. He knows it’s too late for Brian, too late for the teens who died in Littleton.
But he continues to work, to educate and lobby on the devastating effects of bullying so that his son’s death
will not have been in vain. “We should come clean and say what we’ve done in the past is wrong,” says Head.
“Now we will guarantee we’ll protect the rights of students.”
i
Columbine High School shootings: the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two male
students killed twelve students and a teacher, injured twenty-three others, and killed themselves.

ii
condoning: approving

Essay adapted from Anker, S. (2009) Real Essays with Readings. Writing Projects for College, Work and
Everyday life. 3rd Edition. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s. Chapter 44, pages 759-763.