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Crossposted with photo & video: Electronic Village
There are some stories that turn my stomach. This is one of them.
An 11-year-old Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hung himself earlier this week after enduring bullying at school, including daily taunts of being gay, despite his mother’s weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. She said she found her son, a sixth-grader at the school, hanging by an extension cord upstairs at their home.
This is at least the fourth suicide of a middle-school aged child linked to bullying this year. The other three known cases of suicide among middle-school students took place in Chatham, Evanston and Chicago, Ill., in the month of February.
Carl, a junior at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield who did not identify as gay, would have turned 12 on April 17, the same day hundreds of thousands of students will participate in the 13th annual National Day of Silence by taking some form of a vow of silence to bring attention to anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) bullying and harassment at school.
Villagers, does this story bother you as much as me? According to the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of suicide among 10-14 year olds has more than doubled in the past twenty years. "Although suicide among young children is a rare event, the dramatic increase in the rate among persons aged 10-14 years underscores the urgent need for intensifying efforts to prevent suicide among persons in this age group."
I encourage villagers to learn some tips for teens to prevent suicide. And we should keep the Walker-Hoover family in our prayers.
4 Comments
I am also just sick. There are programs for schools, from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Teaching Tolerance. But tolerance of differences is from the top down. And that school ignored cries for help. And a gorgeous kid suffered and died.
I hope President Obama or Michelle starts action on this.
I am not waiting on them. I am going to keep telling this story on my blogs and other blogs, We have to keep his name and story alive for a very long time.
My daughter had a friend when she was in the 6th grade who went through a period of depression where she talked about killing herself. I spoke to the girl’s mother and believe she got some kind of counseling. She didn’t kill herself and seems to be well adjusted now at the age of 15. She has since identified herself as being gay. I wonder how many children go through this torment because of society’s view of homosexuality.
o.k. I was not going to read. but…this is so sad. Too many teachers are aware of bullying and some do absolutely nothing. That is the one thing I can say about growing up with nuns. Most of them would not tolerate bullying.
Bullies allowed to run wild turn into Bush and Cheney’s