Posts Tagged ‘Teacher laughing Japanese boy suicide’

You Don’t Fight Bullying With More Bullying

July 11, 2012

People are entitled to feel very angry at the school that reportedly allowed a young Japanese boy to be bullied to the point of suicide. But it is incredibly important that the anger is expressed in a non-threatening way.

Firstly, those concerned should call for disciplinary measures for all those involved (including students, staff and administrators).

Next, they should be encouraging their children and close friends to speak out against bullying whenever they find themselves to be bystanders.

Finally, they should take an interest in how their local schools deal with bullying situations.

One thing they should not do is threaten the school. This course of action is tantamount to dealing with bullying by becoming the bully:

THE suicide of a 13-year-old boy in central Japan has sparked a series of bomb threats against his school.

Threats have also been made against the local government over claims of negligence in the case, police said.

The boy’s death has snowballed into a national scandal amid reports that bullies routinely forced him to “practice” killing himself before he took his own life, and that his teacher brushed off the abuse as a joke.

A letter sent to the boy’s school in Shiga prefecture threatened that the building would be bombed unless the pupils and teachers involved apologise, local authorities said.

Click here to read my post ‘Child Commits Suicide Due to Alleged Systematic Bullying and Inept Teachers’.

Child Commits Suicide Due to Alleged Systematic Bullying and Inept Teachers

July 7, 2012

I’m sorry but ‘soul searching’ isn’t going to be sufficient in this case:

The suicide of a 13-year-old boy in southern Japan after classmates systematically bullied him — even making him “practice” suicide — while teachers ignored the abuse or laughed has prompted soul-searching among educators across the country.

One of the boy’s last acts was to text his tormentors and leave voice mails for them to say, “I’m going to die.” They texted him back to say, “You should die.”

The middle school student, whose name has not been released,  jumped from his 14th floor apartment in the city of Otsu last October after enduring heartrending tales of abuse at the hands of his classmates.

His father filed several reports with the police, but officers never accepted them, saying that they could not prove that bullying led to his suicide, according to Japanese media reports.

Details of the harassment are coming to light eight months later, following a student survey conducted by the city’s board of education. In that anonymous survey, students write the bullying escalated to “punching and kicking” in September last year, about a month before the teen jumped to his death. The victim was pressured into shoplifting, had his legs and arms tied while bullies duck-taped his mouth. Students watched as their peers pressured the teen into eating dead bees, “pantsed” him, and made him “practice” committing suicide.

In the survey, some classmates report alerting teachers to those “practices,” but say nothing was done.

Instead, teachers reportedly laughed as bullies tried to choke the victim.

Any teacher found to be laughing needs to be sacked immediately. Those who texted back to the boy on the night of his suicide should be expelled.

There is a place for “soul-searching”. This however, is a time for action.

Click here to find out what happened next in this tragic saga.