Posted on 06/03/2012 9:01:25 PM PDT by Nachum
NEW YORK CITY -- A 12-year-old boy harassed by school bullies about his intelligence, his height and his deceased father killed himself in the New York City apartment he shared with his mother, according to relatives and those who knew him, NBCNewYork.com reported.
"I want to remember him as a happy kid," his anguished sister told NBC 4 New York on Thursday.
Joel Morales, of East Harlem, moved to a different school after enduring incessant taunting for months, but the bullying persisted, the fifth-grader’s family said. Advertise | AdChoices
Kids chased Morales, threw sticks and pipes at him and teased him for his smarts and his 4-foot-9 stature, his family said.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.msnbc.msn.com ...
If you aint 6 foot 5 and 300 lbs you get some flack.
It’s no big deal
How horrible.
New York City is no place to raise a kid these days, in my opinion. There are sweeter, less socially twisted places in the US for children to grow up.
Odd description as he was clearly not so “happy” in general.
4’9” at 12?
Is that noticeably out of the norm?
We don’t teach kids to treat others the way you want to be treated anymore because the Left decided we don’t all have the same values and expectations anymore. In fact, it is white racist to have character expectations for teachers and students.
Some teachers don’t act loving towards kids and base rewards and punishments on consistent social behavioral expectations for everyone all at the same time.
Many teachers act like careless bullies towards the children. In the void, darkness has come in and it just gets worse for kids in some places.
There have always been bullies and always will be. I am afraid you are right, that the only way to deal with them is to confront them and fight them if need be. Most bullies back down from fights. I was bullied in the 7th grade by this girl. Every day she banged into me, scattered my books, and said things. One day she really smashed into my back, and it hurt. I knew I was not going to take this anymore and I also knew that I would rather she assaulted me than deal daily with the abuse. My mother told me a story about when she was young and a girl bothered her. My mother who may have been all of five feet tall, told the girl that she would meet her at the flag pole, the bully never showed. In my case, I turned around lifted my umbrella into the air and screamed enough! She was so shocked that I defended myself that she backed down and even began saying hello to me. The point is we are not teaching children to confront adversity and that is a tragedy in itself.
It seems to me that in my day we were picked on, but we’d go home and it was over until the next “day” (or if you were lucky, the next “time”). The kids can’t escape it anymore, 24/7... I think that’s harder than we realize.
Fight back? The kid was 4’9”, surrounded by “kids” who are physically grown men. How do you fight back against a mob of guys each of whom can pick you up in one hand and break you? He didn’t have a father to teach him how to fight, either. He was probably still sorrowing over that.
My feeling is that it is the parents who ultimately failed. Suicide means that the victim felt he had no recourse. None at all. But the family should always be there to turn to. I mean no animosity towards the family, but I think it's inescapable that they failed in their role.
OTOH, who knows. Maybe they begged him every night to tell them what was wrong. I wonder.
And socialists seem to be particularly bent upon bullying, for some reason. Maybe it’s that when their utopian system doesn’t work all that harmoniously, they try to make up for it by brute barking of orders and crude imposition of will.
Bullying, where the golden rule should be, can leave horribly empty aching holes in all the hearts it touches, including those who it mis-teaches. Fighting childhood bullies back is at best a stopgap. Godliness has vanished from the schools.
Although there are blacks there, East Harlem is also known as Spanish Harlem or el Barrio
West Harlem, almost totally black is what you are thinking of. (Sugar Hill) I was last there in 99 and at that time some gentrification had already started.
You've got to find a way. You can't give up.
I completely glossed over his age. The “fifth grader” part has me thinking, 12?...in the 5th grade?
Remember all these bullies grew up with Barney the purple dinosaur and they all have healthy self esteems
An introverted kid is likely to either kill himself or to kill the attackers. Both scenarios had occurred in recent memory.
Children are, by law, a kind of property; they are not entirely humans, as it appears. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to them. Read through it, pretty much every Article is violated when we deal with children. Parents (and schools) can't beat or kill them, but pretty much everything else is OK. Children are told to go there and to do this, but rarely they are listened to, and their complaints are often ignored. This is very dangerous because the society of children is not much different from a wolf pack. Adults are happy to ignore the infighting, telling themselves that "all kids play like that."
Even adults go postal from time to time, when they are unable to otherwise defend themselves or extricate themselves from the situation. Adults have ways to do that; the simplest is to advise your boss that he can have that job and shove it, and then walk out. That's really all that it takes. If you feel the need to leave town - by all means, it's not particularly difficult.
Those options are not available to children. They are told to go to a certain place and be tortured by sadists, day after day after day. Would you, an adult, agree to that? What would you call it when you are forced to go to a plantation school and not just work but also suffer there, with no recourse? What's the difference between a child and a slave? Just the degree of how hard the labor is? Note that children are far more vicious than a group of adults. They may not understand it, but it doesn't change the fact.
If complaints are ignored then anyone, be it a child or an adult, will realize that the torture is not going to stop any time soon. What can a child do? Escaping is not really an option, a 12 y/o kid these days cannot get a job - "for his own good," of course. Children, being immature, can easily jump to conclusions - and they do.
Children are also very sensitive to unfair punishments. They are not cynical enough yet and they don't know the rules of revenge. (Some do, like those two from Columbine.) School's "zero tolerance" rules punish the victim. Many an adult would see red if that is done to him. A child? Nobody knows, and make sure he has no access to anything dangerous.
There could be many good ways to deal with this problem. But adults don't seem to be interested in them. Schools don't care, they have their own marching orders. Parents are often careless. Logically, the best solution would be to allow a child to take control of his life by giving him either the legal status of an adult or at least allowing him to make necessary decisions about his specific situation - with judge's participation, perhaps. When none of that happens the kid, being neither protected nor wanted, sees no other option but to end his life.
An introverted kid is likely to either kill himself or to kill the attackers. Both scenarios had occurred in recent memory.
Children are, by law, a kind of property; they are not entirely humans, as it appears. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to them. Read through it, pretty much every Article is violated when we deal with children. Parents (and schools) can't beat or kill them, but pretty much everything else is OK. Children are told to go there and to do this, but rarely they are listened to, and their complaints are often ignored. This is very dangerous because the society of children is not much different from a wolf pack. Adults are happy to ignore the infighting, telling themselves that "all kids play like that."
Even adults go postal from time to time, when they are unable to otherwise defend themselves or extricate themselves from the situation. Adults have ways to do that; the simplest is to advise your boss that he can have that job and shove it, and then walk out. That's really all that it takes. If you feel the need to leave town - by all means, it's not particularly difficult.
Those options are not available to children. They are told to go to a certain place and be tortured by sadists, day after day after day. Would you, an adult, agree to that? What would you call it when you are forced to go to a plantation school and not just work but also suffer there, with no recourse? What's the difference between a child and a slave? Just the degree of how hard the labor is? Note that children are far more vicious than a group of adults. They may not understand it, but it doesn't change the fact.
If complaints are ignored then anyone, be it a child or an adult, will realize that the torture is not going to stop any time soon. What can a child do? Escaping is not really an option, a 12 y/o kid these days cannot get a job - "for his own good," of course. Children, being immature, can easily jump to conclusions - and they do.
Children are also very sensitive to unfair punishments. They are not cynical enough yet and they don't know the rules of revenge. (Some do, like those two from Columbine.) School's "zero tolerance" rules punish the victim. Many an adult would see red if that is done to him. A child? Nobody knows, and make sure he has no access to anything dangerous.
There could be many good ways to deal with this problem. But adults don't seem to be interested in them. Schools don't care, they have their own marching orders. Parents are often careless. Logically, the best solution would be to allow a child to take control of his life by giving him either the legal status of an adult or at least allowing him to make necessary decisions about his specific situation - with judge's participation, perhaps. When none of that happens the kid, being neither protected nor wanted, sees no other option but to end his life.
I’m a woman. I was bullied when I was a child. I tried to fight back and was beaten. I don’t know what “find a way” means to a little girl who is being repeatedly gut-punched, but I have a suggestion: if there are some techniques you know about that little bullied fatherless kids could use to fight far larger adversaries, you could offer to help them in your city or town. That would be a great blessing and you might even save a life or two.
Did they accuse Romney?
As a kid I learned early on to defend yourself against bullies, no matter the outcome. Most anything can become a weapon, don’t hesitate, pick it up and use it. They quickly make the connection not to mess with someone who is not afraid to hurt them, bad.
If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.
There is some bullying that goes beyond the normal stuff most kids have to deal with. It sounds like it was not stopping even after switching schools. I got bullied and picked on because I was smart and smaller, and I didn’t have any brothers to back me up. The bullies had older brothers.
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