Cops Investigate Gay Bullying in Arizona

In the wake of Jamie Rodermeyer’s death, everyone from Anderson Cooper to President Obama has been focused on preventing more teen suicides and the scourge of anti-gay bullying. That hasn’t stopped kids from Tucson, Arizona’s Sabino High School, however, from bullying of their own. According to Tucson’s KVOA TV, the Pima County Sheriff's department is investigating an exchange between a gay Tanque Verde student and some Sabino High School students who allegedly made threatening comments after the gay student — who asked to remain anonymous — posted a comment about Rodemeyer’s death on Facebook.

“One of the guys who I went to middle school with supported the bullying and congratulated them on all the things they had done,” says the teen victim, who has often been bullied on the way home from school, with other students driving by yelling threats and gay slurs. The bully's comment sparked hundreds more, says KOVA, and while most were positive and encouraging, several of the bullies comments escalated to “terrifying and disgusting” levels.

“It's terrible. It's more frightening than anything else. It just seems like the stuff that progresses into violence,” the victim told reporters.

The Sheriff's Department spoke to the Sabino school administrators who refused to speak with reporters, but reportedly told the police they “handled it” and have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to bullying.
The victim says the frightening experience has had one positive outcome: “It really alerted me to the support system I have at my school” including staff and fellow students who stepped in to help, including teachers who got involved.

Gay Straight Alliance advisor, Julie Smith, told KOVA, “At first I do have to tell you I sat down and cried. I mean some of the threats on Facebook were physical threats and I was afraid they would be carried out. I just couldn't see myself not stepping in and doing something to help out.”

Jamey Rodemeyer Tormentors Under Criminal Investigation

Police have begun a criminal investigation into the suicide death of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-​year old Buffalo-​area teen who was tormented by anti-​gay bullies for years. Local authorities say that while New York does not have anti-​bullying laws, there are other avenues, such as harassment, aggravated harassment, cyber-harassment or hate crimes laws that may apply. Reports state there are several individuals in particular that authorities are investigating.

WATCH: Anderson Cooper: 14-​Year Old Bullied To Death “Even In Sadness, Reaching Out To Help Others”

The Buffalo News today reports, “We’re going to look into whether he was the victim of any crimes leading up to his suicide,” Police Chief John C. Askey said.

“We’re not indicating, not speculating at this point, that that is the cause of his death, … but independently, there may have been crimes that have been committed against him.”
Askey said he spoke Wednesday with Williamsville School Superintendent Scott G. Martzloff, who has pledged the district’s cooperation.
Members of the public, including those from the school community, have reached out to police in recent days with information suggesting that Jamey had been subjected to what would amount to criminal harassment, Askey said.
“We’ve heard that there were some specific students, an identifiable group of students, that had specifically targeted Jamey, or had been picking on him for a period of time,” Askey said.
While investigators are focusing on what may have transpired in the recent past, he said, police are under the impression that one to three students may have been bothering Jamey since he was a student at Heim Middle School.
“We’re looking into it to see if he was the victim of any crimes, and that’s the bottom line,” the chief said. “We’re going to be speaking to school officials and students and anyone with direct information about crimes that may have been committed against this individual.”
Jamey’s mother had previously told The Buffalo News that she believed that a core group of middle school students bullied her son and that the situation worsened for him about a year ago, when many anonymous posts began showing up on Jamey’s Formspring blog stating that he would be better off dead.
…
In a short YouTube video Jamey did in May, he expressed regret for creating the Formspring account “because people would just constantly send me hate.”
The anonymous posts included:
* “Kill your self!!!! You have nothing left!”
* “Listen to us, you’re a bad person, you don’t belong here, jump off a bridge or something!”
* “Go kill yourself, you’re worthless, ugly and dont have a point to live.”
* “You werent born this way. You shouldnt have ever been born.”
Seven months ago, in response to the Formspring question: What’s one thing people don’t know about you? Jamey answered, “How much I hate my life. Maybe it’s cause I’m bullied. a lot.”
His parents and friends said that it took a lot of work and encouragement to get Jamey through that dark period. Eventually, toward the end of last school year, Jamey stopped using Formspring altogether.

The Buffalo News also had published these comments from Jamey Rodemeyer’s FormSpring account:

“JAMIE IS STUPID, GAY, FAT ANND UGLY. HE MUST DIE!” read one post.
Another read: “I wouldn’t care if you died. No one would. So just do it  It would make everyone WAY more happier!”

“The Amherst Police Department’s Special Victims Unit has said it will determine whether to charge some students with harassment, cyber-​harassment or hate crimes,” reports ABC News. “Police said three students in particular might have been involved. Jamey was a student at Heim Middle School.”

Jamey had just started his freshman year at Williamsville North High School. (Both Amherst and Williamsville are just outside Buffalo.) But the bullying had begun during middle school, according to his parents. He had told family and friends that he had endured hateful comments in school and online, mostly related to his sexual orientation.
…
“Justin was a smiley, happy boy who loved to play his cello,” said his parents. “School systems need to do more to protect LGBT students from bullying, and not turn their back on them because of their sexual orientation.”

Teens in Suicide Pact Kill themselves

A pair of Minnesota teens who felt bullied and ostracized by fellow middle school students killed themselves this weekend during what appeared to be an innocent sleepover.
Haylee Fentress and Paige Moravetz were found Saturday in the small town of Lynd. The two 14-year-olds hanged themselves and left notes in an apparent suicide pact.
"I think they've had this for some time," Robin Settle, Fentress' aunt, told ABC News. The two were found by Fentress' mother. Moravetz was sleeping over at her best-friend's home because her parents were on vacation in Hawaii. "She attempted to resuscitate them," Settle said, but it was too late.

Moravetz moved to the small Minnesota town a year ago and had a hard time making friends, her aunt said. She and Fentress' friendship appeared to grow out of the pair's shared feeling of being excluded. Settle said her niece told her she was "made fun of for being overweight ... and she didn't fit in."

Fentress didn't want "anybody to be sad for her," according to Settle, and dictated in her suicide note that her funeral have lots of pink, princesses and butterflies.  Marshall Middle School, where the two girls attended, held a gathering Tuesday to reach out to parents and provide information on how to discuss the incident with their children.

"You don't get over it," Marshall Superintendent Klint Willert said, according to the Marshall Independent newspaper. "But by working together, we can get through it."

From the White House Blog---Bullying Prevention questions

Answering Your Questions on Bullying Prevention


Posted by Sarah Bernard on March 08, 2011 at 01:43 PM EST

Every day, thousands of kids, teens, and young adults around the country are bullied. Estimates are that nearly one-third of all school-aged children are bullied each school year - upwards of 13 million students. Students involved in bullying are more likely to have challenges in school, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to have health and mental health issues. If we fail to address bullying we put ourselves at a disadvantage for increasing academic achievement and making sure all of our students are college and career ready.



On Thursday, the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention will bring together communities from across the nation who have been affected by bullying as well as those who are taking action to address it. As part of the agenda, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett will host a policy panel with issue experts including Catherine Bradshaw of Johns Hopkins University, George Sugai from the University of Connecticut, Susan Swearer-Napolitano from the University of Nebraska, as well as the Cyberbullying Research Center's Justin Patchin.



Would you like Valerie to pose a question on your behalf?



Send us your question here, or at Facebook.com/WhiteHouse to ask your question as a comment on our wall. Valerie Jarrett will pose as many of them as she can during the Experts Panel on Thursday morning. Tune in to watch at 11:00am EST at whitehouse.gov/live.

Rutgers Suicide Raises Difficult Questions

The following is an article from online that I found about the current suicide of Rutgers Freshman, Tyler Clememti. The article was originally posted on FanHouse and was written by Clay Travis.

Thanks to technology we can do things that our grandparents would have never dreamed of doing. Thanks to that same technology people can also commit crimes that would have once seemed impossible.

In the wake of Rutgers freshman, Tyler Clementi's suicide, reportedly brought on by the taping of his sexual encounter by other college students, it's worth considering how technology has fundamentally altered our conceptions of privacy. One of the two defendants in this case, Dharun Ravi, used Twitter, ichat, and a webcam to secretly videotape his roommate as he engaged in a sexual encounter with another man. Clementi was so distraught over the distribution of these images over the Internet that he leaped to his death from New York City's George Washington Bridge.

In the wake of Clementi's suicide, Ravi and another woman/student, Molly Wei, have been charged with violating New Jersey's invasion of privacy statutes. Those statutes make it a crime "to collect or view images depicting nudity or sexual contact involving another individual without that person's consent." There is also a separate crime should those images be transmitted. In addition to these charges, gay rights groups have called for Ravi and Wei to be charged with hate crimes as well, alleging that their motivation was based upon Clementi's sexuality.

Whether the defendants are also charged with a hate crime will likely depend on if the state of New Jersey can uncover any evidence that their acts were motivated by Clementi's homosexuality. In making this determination, the state will investigate text messages, emails, and sundry other technological clues to uncover the motivations behind the acts. In the meantime, it's worth considering what Clementi's suicide teaches us about the rapidly shifting arena of cyber crime and how many ways in which an individual's privacy can be invaded that weren't even possible 10 years ago.

Where once an individual student would have had a difficult time invading the privacy of another student, now any student in a dorm can be a victim of this crime. Indeed, while the individuals charged in with this crime may be condemned for their acts, surreptitious recording of an individual without that individual's consent is not uncommon. Last year, ESPN's Erin Andrews became a high-profile victim of secret videotaping while she was in her hotel room. What makes the Rutgers crime unique isn't the crime itself, it's the reaction of the victim to the crime.

And that, more than anything else, points to the dangers inherent in invasion of privacy crimes. The defendants in this case are likely to argue that they were unaware that Clementi would react as he did to their secret videotaping and that they considered this nothing more than a prank. Indeed, the actual crime here has been subsumed by Clementi's reaction to the crime. Imagine that rather than being driven to suicide, Clementi merely turns in these students to Rutgers for violating his privacy.

Do we ever hear about the crime? Does it receive any publicity?

Probably not. The students likely receive probation. At most, maybe they're forced to withdraw from school. That's it.

Instead we're all horrified, justifiably so, by Clementi's reaction when his privacy was invaded. And that reaction, more than anything, should serve as a teachable moment for parents, children, and educators. Do students truly realize the severity of the reactions that their modern acts can provoke? Or has technology so pervaded their lives that the severity of the act itself -- broadcasting someone engaged in a sexual act without consent -- been devalued? Indeed, in an age when celebrities hawk sex tapes and become even more famous than they already were, have we all been desensitized to the idea of what privacy means?

That's a broad question without an easy answer. Isn't the out that we are punishing the defendants for the result of their act more than the actual act itself? And if that's the case isn't that backward? Shouldn't we be treating the crime as severe no matter how the defendant reacts? Otherwise how can we demonstrate that even in the age of Facebook an individual right to privacy still exists?

So what can this case teach us? First, that invasion of privacy is a serious crime regardless of what reaction it provokes. Second, you can't predict how anyone is going to deal with cyber-bullying, harassment, or the invasion of his privacy. Many will cope without any issues. Others, as we see with Clementi, may never be able to escape the wrong that was perpetrated against them.

In our civil courts, that is the non-criminal field of law, the thin-skulled plaintiff rule has existed for generations. Pursuant to the thin-skulled plaintiff rule if you behave in a negligent manner that leads to another individual's injury, you are responsible for all the damages that ensue as a result of your act. That's even though you had no clue that the plaintiff in your situation had a thin-skull and was more susceptible to damage than he or she appeared.

The rule is applied in a criminal setting as well, but in our modern era maybe it should receive a new name, the thin-skinned expectation. From this point forward, you should assume that everything you do to invade someone else's privacy could be the precipitating factor that sets them off on a path of destruction. Did the defendants in this case believe that Clementi might commit suicide based upon what they considered to be a prank? Probably not. Should they have? Who knows. Should every student in America think about Clementi in the future when they consider invading another student's privacy for sport.

You bet.

It's the only way any of us can learn a lesson from a tragedy.