Comprehensive anti-bullying bill passes

Activists hope LGBT students will be protected despite lack of enumerated categories.

The House and Senate unanimously passed the Anti-Bullying Bill on April 29, creating new measures to protect Massachusetts's youth from bullying and harassment at school. Governor Deval Patrick signed the bill into law on Monday, May 3. Local activists hope that despite a lack of LGBT-specific language in the bill, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender kids will be better protected.

"This legislation will save lives if it is implemented and enforced correctly," said DeeDee Edmondson, political director of MassEquality. "Research shows that LGBT students, or those perceived to be, are disproportionately targeted for school bullying. We look forward to working with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to ensure that this research is taken into consideration during the development of anti-bullying curricula and training programs."

The bill calls for several improvements in school responses to bullying. It recommends counseling for both perpetrator and victim, professional training for all members of school staff, and an increased level of responsibility on the part of school officials. Teachers will be required to report bullying to their principal, and principals in turn will be required to report instances of bullying to the parents of all students involved.

"After more than ten years of starts and stops, educators will now have the tools to prevent bullying so that students can learn and grow in a safe environment," Scott Gortikov, executive director of MassEquality, said. "We're grateful to the legislature for overwhelmingly supporting the Anti-Bullying Bill."

Despite a push to include enumerated categories in the bill's language-a list of student populations understood to face disproportionate occurrences of bullying and harassment, such as LGBT students-the version that passed lacked such specifications. "This policy leaves behind Massachusetts' most at-risk youth," Stanley Griffith, board president of Greater Boston Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians & Gays (PFLAG), and Danielle Murray, co-chair of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), said in a joint statement. "It is critical to specifically name the problem in this kind of legislation -- girls would not have sports and our schools would not be integrated if policymakers had not specifically addressed these inequities by enumerating categories like sex and race into our laws."

Recent studies have shown that LGBT students (ranging from elementary school to high school) can face an intense and brutal brand of bullying. According to the 2007 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey, high school students who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender were almost five times more likely to attempt suicide than students who identified as straight. LGBT students also reported being bullied almost twice as often as their straight peers. More disturbingly, nearly two-thirds of students participating in GLSEN's 2007 National School Climate Survey (NSCS) reported hearing homophobic remarks from school personnel.

GLSEN president Griffith stressed the need for specifically enumerated categories, citing the results of the NSCS, which revealed that teachers were significantly more likely to intervene when homophobic bullying occurred in states with enumerated policies (25.3%), as compared to states with either generic policies (15.9%) or no policies in place (12.3%).

The April 2009 suicide of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a student at a Springfield charter school, brought more attention to issues of anti-LGBT or homophobic bullying. Classmates chronically teased Walker-Hoover, telling him he was gay and acted like a girl. The bullying and taunting became unbearable for the 11-year-old. Walker-Hoover hanged himself with an electrical cord in his family's home after leaving behind a note telling his family he loved them and giving his Pok�mon cards to his six-year-old brother.

"My son was bulled with anti-gay remarks," Walker-Hoover's mother, Sirdeaner Walker, said at last week's press conference for the bill. "Those kids at his school called him those names because they were probably the most hurtful things they could think of to say. And they hit their mark. Sexist and homophobic bullying and harassment are all too common. And evidence shows that school officials often do not recognize this kind of bullying and harassment as unacceptable."

The proposed Anti-Bullying Bill received a push from lawmakers following the January 2010 suicide of 15-year-old South Hadley student Phoebe Prince. The teen took her own life after enduring relentless bullying from two groups of girls at her high school. Six teenagers are facing criminal charges as a result of her death.

"The politicians were relative latecomers to the effort," read a statement from the Anti-Violence Project of Massachusetts, "but finally mustered the will to act after the tragic suicides of Phoebe Prince and Carl Walker-Hoover." The AVP also lamented the lack of enumerated categories in the bill. "The original impetus for this bill came from the LGBT community, which has felt the lash of schoolyard harassment especially hard for as long as anyone can remember. ...[W]e cannot overlook the fact that the law makes no mention of the role[s] sexual orientation and gender identity play in motivating bullying behavior."

Whether or not the new law will adequately protect LGBT students, activists said, remains to be seen. "The difficult work of stopping bullying is just beginning," the AVP statement read. The organization called for close monitoring of school officials' adherence to -- and politicians' supervision of -- the new regulations.