Sticks and Stones Can Break My Bones and Words Can Really Hurt Me

Lawrence King (15 years old) was shot twice in his head on February 12, 2008, by a 14-year-old classmate at E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California. The eighth-grade classmates of the perpetrator and the victim described the "bad blood" that existed between the two because of the victim's openly gay appearance. Classmates admitted that the victim, a child from a foster setting, had been the target of harassment because of his feminine dress, hair arrangements, and other mannerisms that were gender non-normative. Gay-baiting and taunting turned deadly with the announcement that he was brain dead by February 14 (Saillant & Covarrubias, 2008). Although extreme, this example provides a sinister punctuation to the articles making up this special issue. The lead authors of this group of articles (Poteat, 2008; Swearer, Turner, Givens, & Pollack, 2008; Espelage, Aragon, Birkett, & Koenig, 2008; Rivers & Noret, 2008) describe a disturbing picture. According to the authors' reports and the most recent publication from the National Center for Education Statistics on school safety (Nolle, Guerino, & Dinkes, 2007), 43% of middle school educators report that student bullying occurs at school daily or weekly. Twenty-two percent of high school and 21% of primary school educators report this same frequency. Victims appear to be chosen based on their physical appearance (e.g., weak or obese), clothes, high grades, non-normative looks or behavior (e.g., weird or geeky), and non-normative gender behaviors. Within a social context that enforces behavior standards through threats, taunts, and physical attacks, young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered (LGBT), or who look like they may be LGBT, or may be questioning their sexual orientation, are at some special risk for bullying with the accompanying threats to their physical, academic, and psychological well-being (Poteat, 2008; Swearer et al., 2008). Although school bullies are not modern inventions, the effects on individuals and the moderators and mediators of effects are now better understood and open to scrutiny through modern methodological approaches apparent in several of the articles in this special issue (Espelage et al., 2008; Rivers & Noret, 2008). Schools: Safe Havens or Trial by Fire? Of some special note is that the social context within and across various friendship groups of young people appear to influence both the frequency of bullying behaviors and the ways in which the bullying is internalized (Poteat, 2008). Further, victimization seems to affect some students' perception of the entire school climate, with victims predictably reporting less favorable climates than nonvictims. Interstingly, as young people progress through school some of their attitudes toward bullying actually become more positive, as they interpret the bullying as teaching others how to behave in their particular organizational contexts (Swearer et al., 2008). These findings illustrate that both the behaviors as sociated with bullying and the effects of being bullied on young people are not merely the products of individual histories. These investigations of system-level forces that operate to promote or mitigate bullying occurrences and effects suggest the need for further inquiry about how the adults in school settings are involved in bullying. Assertions in several of the articles suggest that teachers are not perceived to intervene or do not intervene, especially when the victims are or are perceived to be LGBT. However, a reality is that some educators may not know how to intervene effectively (Whitman, Horn, & Boyd, 2007). They may normalize physical bullying as gender specific to males and relational bullying as specific to females, and therefore part of normal development. Further, adults may believe that children learn to be tough and resilient by dealing with same-age bullies and thus resist intervening as a way to promote self-confidence in victimized children. …