There is some truth in your posts
One can call a kid who snaps and kills evil
One can blame parents for not helping him
One can also note that bullying can be brutal and some kids pile on mercilessly and some snap
What surprises me is this bullying is 16-19 year olds..
When I was a kid bullying was more ages 9-13/14
I was redneck enough and big enough that anyone tried it I fought back which is without question the key
But today you’ll be punished for that I’m told
I’m father to five
I have empathy ..what can I say
You’re right, the age of bullying has apparently risen towards the higher grades of secondary school, in my day the worst of it seemed to end around the ninth grade. I think it’s probably the internet, can you imagine what the 1960s and early 1970s would have been like with internet, facebook, smart phones, etc (and nobody wore seat belts either), so the distracted driving thing among high school seniors would have been horrific.
I found that bullying faded away when I lost my accent, grew to adult height, and got out of a general stream of all kinds of students into an academic stream headed for higher education (fat lot of good that did most of us, but that’s another story).
Somebody tried to bully me in adult life in one isolated instance and I decked the guy which ended that. But the stuff I went through from about age eight to twelve was horrendous, sort of non-stop trauma whenever outside the home. The problem for parents can be this — before you emigrate, your kid is normal and fits into the community so you get used to that. Then suddenly you’re in a new country, perhaps because you’re among adults in a workplace, you are only mildly subjected to prejudice and you find things are improving (because you emigrated for a reason — in my parents’ case, to fill a specialized job market with no available Canadian workers). The kid meanwhile, overnight, goes from being well-integrated and normal to the outsider and subject to constant harassment and physical threats. To make it worse, I was easily the head of the class in academic terms which attracts further abuse. To pile on somewhat, my mother taught at my school and was Jewish, and the principal at the school was a German war veteran who had just emigrated to Canada a few years earlier. He hated me and my mother and refused to treat any of the bullying as anything but my own fault (I got the strap, the bullies got a second round of jollies from that).
I should sue the damned school board in my old home town for this but I am not into revenge lawsuits. Even so, it’s a wonder I reached adulthood in even marginally sane conditions.
The phyiscal abuse was considerable. I would have to try to work my way through a gathered crowd of eager fighters most of whom were two or three years older than me and hockey players who had lots of experience fighting. Their parents tended to be cretins who encouraged them (you can imagine that having English people and Jews in their midst was not a great thing — back in the 50’s the slur used was “d.p’s” which stands for displaced people. So my options were to fight or to hide out and wait for them to get tired of waiting. Memory is a bit faded now but it seems to me this went on for about two or three years on at least a weekly basis.
I also had to be wary of running into groups of these hockey bums on the streets of the small Ontario town in question. Then again, I could be beaten up. One day I got cornered and had to fight, and I bloodied one guy’s nose, but this enraged them more and I had to run for my life. It may not be a coincidence that by final grade of public school I was the school’s 100-yard dash champ and second among all the schools in the region. I guess that other kid was either a better runner or from a worse place than England.