A brother and sister in Ontario who were mercilessly bullied through high-school, physically and mentally, by a pair of boys who actually put up public websites and took videos to document their artistic torment, are suing their high-school administrators for not putting a stop to it. I tend to think of this as a good thing. In Junior High, I helped organize a nuclear disarmament group among my classmates, and was consequently the object of frequent harassment and assaults by a small group of military cadets who attended the school. The lame-duck administrator, a guy named Lloyd Hogg, was a supporter of nuclear proliferation and so refused to do anything about it until my father showed up to pick me up from school one afternoon and caught two boys about twice my size hurling empty glass pop bottles at my head, whereupon he leapt out of the car and dragged the little jerks into the principle's office.
Hogg's response was to retaliate by confiscating the banner and pamphlets our peace-group had made. The story linked below, about the torture these kids suffered while the administration sat idly by, is pretty familiar, though what they went through was a thousand times worse. I hope they win their case. While anti-bullying rules in other jurisdictions have had their occassional excesses (expulsion of students who have minor, isolated schoolyard scraps under a nonsensical "zero-tolerance" policy), I'd love to see a world where absentee principals like Hogg (and the unnamed prinicpal of Pearson High in Burlington, ON) are hung out to dry for their complicity in bestial torture. Maybe a little personal liability would convice these soi-distant guardians of student safety to take their responsibilities seriously.
