College freshman commits suicide after sex tape posted on internet by roommate

[A stor]

Originally Posted by corianderstem

On the one hand, what a fuckwad.

On the other hand, sometimes it's nice that Facebook and Twitter lets fuckwads out themselves as fuckwads because they're too dumb to realize that stuff you put on the internet is out there for the world to see, one way or the other.

Yes that is true. Let these f-wads expose themselves for exactly who they are. Bullying on the internet is something my generation didn't experience. It saddens me as to how cruel someone can be to another.

If you wanted to call someone cruel names. You had to do it face to face. Then some back alley justice would prevail.

[martha]

Sometimes they said it to their faces in Arkansas.

[deep]

Arkansas school board member to resign over anti-gay post - CNN.com

McCance said that he has received an outpouring of criticism over his comments, including "thousands of phone calls, hate mails, people threatening to kill my family and me."

He said he has sent his wife and two kids out of the state because of fears for their safety and that he is installing a security system at his home.

"I'm reaping what I've sown," he told CNN. "I've had a lot of hate speech thrown at me and my family on every level."

[corianderstem]

It's disheartening to see people resort to threatening violence*, but I'm glad he's resigning.

*maybe he's making it up to try and gain sympathy. He's already outed himself as a hateful jerk, so I wouldn't put it past him to do something else assholish.

[Moonlit_Angel]

Yeah, the death threats against him and his family (???? They had nothing to do with his stupid comments) are dumb-you're not helping the situation, people, cool it.

But yes, he was a complete and utter moron for saying such things. 1, you're a member of the SCHOOL BOARD. I'd kinda like to know my kids aren't going to a school that's being overseen by people who say crap like that. 2., it's a damn heartless thing to say no matter what, plain and simple. You're supposed to be an adult with a working brain. Grow up and use it, mmkay?

Angela

[deep]

If you open the link,

he did own up, and offer a sincere apology.

this thinking does not happen in a vacuum, I am sure his beliefs were validated by his upbringing and most likely his 'faith community'.

[A stor]

Originally Posted by martha

Sometimes they said it to their faces in Arkansas.

That is true Martha. Though, I was too young to have witnessed it.

[martha]

Last year, when we were in Bloomington, we were walking through the halls of the IU Student Union. There was a photography exhibit, and one of the pictures was of two grown women. I don't remember if they were in this photo (above) or not, but one of the women was one of the Little Rock Nine, and the other was a white woman who had been screaming at her way back when. In the modern photo, they had their arms around each other, with huge, happy smiles on their faces.

That picture made me feel good about the future.

[A stor]

Thanks Martha for sharing. It makes me feel good about the future too. Lucky for me, by the time. I attended school. Children of all races were educated together. And I certainly benefited from this.

[Moonlit_Angel]

Originally Posted by martha

Last year, when we were in Bloomington, we were walking through the halls of the IU Student Union. There was a photography exhibit, and one of the pictures was of two grown women. I don't remember if they were in this photo (above) or not, but one of the women was one of the Little Rock Nine, and the other was a white woman who had been screaming at her way back when. In the modern photo, they had their arms around each other, with huge, happy smiles on their faces.

That picture made me feel good about the future.

That's an awesome story .

There are definitely many instances I've seen in recent times that can give one hope. The change may be slow, but as long as it's happening at all, that's reason enough to be optimistic.

Angela

[A stor]

I think so too, Angela. Well said!

[HBK-79]

^^

[BoMac]

Hear, hear.

My son is gay � Nerdy Apple Bottom

[Moonlit_Angel]

Excellent piece. Those moms can put it in their pipes and smoke it.

Angela

[Knuckle]

Originally Posted by BoMac

Hear, hear.

My son is gay � Nerdy Apple Bottom

This absolutely deserves its own thread. There is a lot to talk about in that blog post.

[yolland]

^ It does concern gender-based bullying, which is what most of this thread's been about. I wouldn't mind splitting it off if BoMac wanted to, but I also think it's fine here.

Personally, I disagree with the way this mother handled some aspects of the situation, particularly the fact that she (in her own words) 'blew off' her son's expressed concern that other people might ridicule his costume, and insisted he stick with it. That could have been an opportunity to have an honest discussion with the child about, While I think this is a fun and interesting costume, yes, some children and some adults might be uncomfortable with a boy dressing like a girl, they may show that by acting mean, and here are some good ways you can respond to them if they do--are you OK with all that? You can let the child make his own decision, and support him in it, without giving him falsely rosy expectations of other people's possible responses. In fact, depending to a considerable degree on the personality of the child in question and the social situation he'd be wearing the costume in, I might just go ahead and have that discussion with him the first time he expressed interest in the costume.

"If my daughter had dressed as Batman, no one would have thought twice about it"--that just tells me she's never had the experience of being the kind of girl who wants to be Batman, or had a daughter who is. The responses such a girl may get are different from what a boy may get--condescending and patronizing rather than hostile and aggressive--but they can still be hurtful.

[yolland]

It doesn't concern gender or sexual orientation, but, how's this for an innovative antibullying program:

New York Times, Oct. 8

...Roots of Empathy was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an educator who had built Canada’s largest network of school-based parenting and family-literacy centers after having worked with neglectful and abusive parents. Gordon had found many of them to be lacking in empathy for their children. They hadn’t developed the skill because they hadn’t experienced or witnessed it sufficiently themselves. She envisioned Roots as a seriously proactive parent education program–one that would begin when the mothers- and fathers-to-be were in kindergarten. Since then, Roots has worked with more than 12,600 classes across Canada, and in recent years, the program has expanded to the Isle of Man, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States, where it currently operates in Seattle. Researchers have found that the program increases kindness and acceptance of others and decreases negative aggression.

Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits--a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”

I have visited several public schools in low-income neighborhoods in Toronto to observe Roots of Empathy’s work. What I find most fascinating is how the baby actually changes the children’s behavior. Teachers have confirmed my impressions: tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes. The baby seems to act like a heart-softening magnet. No one fully understands why. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, an applied developmental psychologist who is a professor at the University of British Columbia, has evaluated Roots of Empathy in four studies. “Do kids become more empathic and understanding? Do they become less aggressive and kinder to each other? The answer is yes and yes,” she explained. “The question is why.”

C. Sue Carter, a neurobiologist based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has conducted pioneering research into the effects of oxytocin, a hormone that has been linked with caring and trusting behavior, suspects that biology is playing a role in the program’s impact. “This may be an oxytocin story,” Carter told me. “I believe that being around the baby is somehow putting the children in a biologically different place. We don’t know what that place is because we haven’t measured it. However, if it works here as it does in other animals, we would guess that exposure to an infant would create a physiological state in which the children would be more social.”

To parent well, you must try to imagine what your baby is experiencing. So the kids do a lot of “perspective taking.” When the baby is too small to raise its own head, for example, the instructor asks the children to lay their heads on the blanket and look around from there. Perspective taking is the cognitive dimension of empathy--and like any skill it takes practice to master. (Cable news hosts, take note.)

Children learn strategies for comforting a crying baby. They learn that one must never shake a baby. They discover that everyone comes into the world with a different temperament, including themselves and their classmates. They see how hard it can be to be a parent, which helps them empathize with their own mothers and fathers. And they marvel at how capacity develops. Each month, the baby does something that it couldn’t do during its last visit: roll over, crawl, sit up, maybe even begin walking. Witnessing the baby’s triumphs--even something as small as picking up a rattle for the first time--the children will often cheer.

Ervin Staub, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, has studied altruism in children and found that the best way to create a caring climate is to engage children collectively in an activity that benefits another human being. In Roots, children are enlisted in each class to do something to care for the baby, whether it is to sing a song, speak in a gentle voice, or make a “wishing tree.”

The results can be dramatic. In a study of first- to third-grade classrooms, Schonert-Reichl focused on the subset of kids who exhibited “proactive aggression”--the deliberate and cold-blooded aggression of bullies who prey on vulnerable kids. Of those who participated in the Roots program, 88% decreased this form of behavior over the school year, while in the control group, only 9% did, and many actually increased it. Schonert-Reichl has reproduced these findings with fourth to seventh grade children in a randomized controlled trial. She also found that Roots produced significant drops in “relational aggression”--things like gossiping, excluding others, and backstabbing. Research also found a sharp increase in children’s parenting knowledge.

“Empathy can’t be taught, but it can be caught,” Gordon often says--and not just by children. “Programmatically my biggest surprise was that not only did empathy increase in children, but it increased in their teachers,” she added. “And that, to me, was glorious, because teachers hold such sway over children.”

When the program was implemented on a large scale across the province of Manitoba--it’s now in 300 classrooms there--it achieved an “effect size” that Rob Santos, the scientific director of Healthy Child Manitoba, said translates to reducing the proportion of students who get into fights from 15% to 8%, close to a 50% reduction. “For a program that costs only hundreds of dollars per child, the cost-benefit of preventing later problems that cost thousands of dollars per child, is obvious,” said Santos.

Follow up studies have found that outcomes are maintained or enhanced three years after the program ends. “When you’ve got emotion and cognition happening at the same time, that’s deep learning,” explains Gordon. “That’s learning that will last.”

[A stor]

Originally Posted by yolland

^ It does concern gender-based bullying, which is what most of this thread's been about. I wouldn't mind splitting it off if BoMac wanted to, but I also think it's fine here.

Personally, I disagree with the way this mother handled some aspects of the situation, particularly the fact that she (in her own words) 'blew off' her son's expressed concern that other people might ridicule his costume, and insisted he stick with it. That could have been an opportunity to have an honest discussion with the child about, While I think this is a fun and interesting costume, yes, some children and some adults might be uncomfortable with a boy dressing like a girl, they may show that by acting mean, and here are some good ways you can respond to them if they do--are you OK with all that? You can let the child make his own decision, and support him in it, without giving him falsely rosy expectations of other people's possible responses. In fact, depending to a considerable degree on the personality of the child in question and the social situation he'd be wearing the costume in, I might just go ahead and have that discussion with him the first time he expressed interest in the costume.

"If my daughter had dressed as Batman, no one would have thought twice about it"--that just tells me she's never had the experience of being the kind of girl who wants to be Batman, or had a daughter who is. The responses such a girl may get are different from what a boy may get--condescending and patronizing rather than hostile and aggressive--but they can still be hurtful.

Yolland, I agree with you here. Plus she is talking about a five year old dressing up as a party girl for Halloween. What makes her so sure that her son is gay? Not that there would be anything wrong with this of course. But to say it about a five year old because his best friend is a girl. So what? I played Bat Man at that age and my best friend was a boy. I grew up to be heterosexual. My point about the article. Just love them and let them be children. They have enough crap to deal with, when they grow up.

[MrsSpringsteen]

forbes.com

Dec. 22 2010
By KASHMIR HILL

The parents of Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide earlier this year after his roommate streamed his gay tryst via webcam, plan to sue Rutgers University over their son’s death. They sent notice of the civil suit to the university on Friday, reports the Courier News.

“It appears Rutgers University failed to act, failed to put in place and/or failed to implement, and enforce policies and practices that would have prevented or deterred such acts, and that Rutgers failed to act timely and appropriately,” the notice reads.

It lists the damages as Clementi’s pain and suffering and the parents’ loss of companionship and support and their financial costs. The notice does not list a dollar amount claimed for those damages.


Clementi’s roommate Dharun Ravi and his friend Molly Wei have been charged with criminal invasion of privacy for their roles in surreptitiously filming Clementi. Of course, when filing a civil suit, the family would want to think about who has the deepest pockets, and that’s Rutgers.

When Clementi realized he had been filmed, he turned to a gay message forum for advice. He revealed there that he had informed an R.A. about what happened. As a former Duke R.A., I’ve previously expressed surprise that the resident adviser did not immediately offer Clementi a new room.

I understand from my reporting that the family was disturbed that the university — through the R.A. — did not immediately spring into action when Clementi reported that a crime had been committed against him. The family feels that the university’s failure to act put their son in a position (on the night he committed suicide) in which he would be forced to sleep in a small room with someone that had criminally violated him.

The family now alleges that the university “failed to protect Clementi against ‘unlawful or otherwise improper acts perpetrated against’ the Rutgers freshman,” reports the Courier News. They also filed a breach of contract claim, saying that the university broke its agreement with the Rutgers freshman by failing to protect him. Rutgers has responded to say it is sympathetic to what happened, but not responsible for Clementi’s suicide.

When I previously wrote about this, I spoke with a former New Jersey prosecutor about the likelihood of success for a civil suit against the university. “At the moment, there are not enough facts to know if there was a breach of duty,” said Dennis Kearney, a partner at Day Pitney, unaffiliated with the case or the investigation. “But that’s going to be the $64,000 question.”

[KhanadaRhodes]

Originally Posted by MrsSpringsteen

Rutgers has responded to say it is sympathetic to what happened, but not responsible for Clementi’s suicide.

well sure, to get technical only he was responsible for his suicide. but there's always contributing factors for it, and the fact that they did nothing about this didn't help. at the very least they should've moved him to another building while investigating the incident. it's easy for them to be "sympathetic" now that he's dead and it's made international news.