People have a firm belief that they have the right to put labels onto others. This attitude from parents is directly responsible for their children learning to label and prejudice people. This leads to a dangerous pandemic of bullying and persecution.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports 1,876,900 recorded incidents of bullying and 689,100 recorded incidents that required police from 2009-2010, and bullying has increased by 20 percent in 2012 since 2011.
“Just love yourself and you’re set. And I promise you, it’ll get better.” These words were spoken in a YouTube video by 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer hoping to inspire other bullied youth to stay strong, be themselves and not to give into the tortures of bullying.
Jamey wrote on his blog, “I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens. What do I have to do so people will listen to me?”
On Sept. 18, about one week later, Jamey succumbed to the pressures of his bullied existence and took his own life.
“It [bullying] took him away from our family way too early and we’re just convinced that he had a purpose on this planet and it was to touch as many people as he could,” said Tracy Rodemeyer, Jamey’s mother, in an interview with NBC.
The fact that bullying has become such an issue that any child takes their own life is appalling in itself. The fact that Jamey is only one of many children that have committed suicide is nothing less than a travesty.
The numbers are grim. Education.com states that every day there are 11 youth suicides. The Center for Disease Control also reports that 15 percent of high school students have seriously considered killing themselves and 11 percent of high school students made actual plans for committing suicide.
Jamey had entered into counseling at his school prior to his death, but it was too little too late. Dan Savage, co-founder of It Gets Better, wrote in his blog, “Sometimes, the damage done by hate and by haters is simply too great.”
It Gets Better is an Internet-based project founded in response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because they were gay or because their peers suspected that they were gay. Its goal is to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having gay adults convey the message that these teens’ lives will improve.
Sexual orientation is a scary subject in America. It’s something so foreign to most people that they fear it, and whether it is intentional or unintentional, that fear is taught to their children.
Gay and lesbian teens are five times more likely to commit suicide than other youths according to lifescience.com, and about 30 percent of all completed suicides have been related to a sexual identity crisis.
Jamey was struggling with sexual identity issues, and after posting about his confusion on a social networking site, his nightmare continued.
An anonymous post to Jamey’s account read, “I wouldn’t care if you died. No one would. So just do it. It would make everyone way more happier!”
Where has our society gone wrong that we are ensuring the teaching of blind hatred to our children? Children’s bad behavior is either treated with too much leniency or blatantly reinforced by their parents. The “don’t do it again” rule isn’t working.
Just because you might think that something is morally wrong, even if it isn’t hurting anyone else, does not give you the right to persecute and degrade a person for it.
If you think you are entitled to do so, because it goes against your religion or faith in God, just remember that you are not God, and you are not the judge. If something is wrong, let your God be the judge and don’t degrade yourself by committing persecution. That goes against God’s will too.
“No one in my school cares about preventing suicide, while you’re the ones calling me [gay slur] and tearing me down,” Jamey wrote on his blog on Sept. 8, 2011.
The issue of bullying resulting in teen suicide can no longer be looked at as a series of isolated incidents. We need to address it as an ongoing problem nationwide, and immediately begin to generate solutions. We need to do it for our youth; we need to do it for Jamey.
