Katherine Perry: Bullying 8/4

After Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old Irish high school student transplanted to Massachusetts, committed suicide, bullying became the new evil of the age. Phoebe, so the media said, was tortured by a cruel high school clique, eventually taking desperate refuge in suicide. In an unprecedented move, six of her classmates were criminally charged, to the cheers of almost all. Recently, the online magazine Slate published a series of articles proffering a different view: a less clear-cut story of mental illness, complicated high school relationships, hazy motivations. 

This version has proved unpalatable to most, who have accused its author of re-victimizing the victim. Within the article is the suggestion that an overzealous legal structure is seeking to take revenge on an educational system that wasn't up to the task of saving a very troubled girl, by using these six kids as scapegoats. And I agree. I've suffered my fair share of bullies, and while at the time I may have wished on them a strong measure of fire and brimstone, the latest push to demonize them goes too far.

When I was in junior high, I had a pretty serious, chronic nasal congestion problem- with my own personal bullying squad to chronicle it for me. Each day in art class I could count on one girl to sidle up along side my desk and sing a scathing, but surprisingly catchy, song- "Nasal Congestion Woman". Each day I was greeted with a different installment of the adventures of my alter-ego; many were disgusting, some were obscene- all were humiliating. 

Silly as it sounds, it was viciously meant and seriously taken. Now that gangleader is one of my closet friends. When asked to explain that campaign of cruelty, she told the story of a deeply unhappy, isolated and angry person- but not an irredeemable one. She since has done what all us have to do- shed her crude and intractable adolescent self, and reconciled that often ugly castoff with a new self.

There will always kids that traverse the cruel school battlefield by becoming a source of pain rather than the target of it. But most bullies don't grow up to be sociopaths, and by labeling them early on in life as predators and criminals you mark them forever and risk scrambling their unfixed moral compasses. A system that is so eager to abandon its kids for grave, but most likely self-correcting flaws, is as devoid of empathy and compassion as the worst schoolyard bully.