(Photo: Steven Fernandez via Flickr)

A court panel has ruled in favor of a student who claims that officials at Hudson Middle School in southeast Michigan’s Lenawee County were deliberately indifferent and failed to take any action to stop systemic bullying from other students — and even from faculty members.
 
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling does not settle the case but remands it back to the district court for a full trial.

The male student, who is referred to in the ruling only by the initials DP, was apparently the victim of constant harassment and at least one instance of sexual assault from his classmates, beginning in the sixth grade. In one incident cited by the court, a teacher joined in on the abuse:

On one occasion, DP attempted to stop a female classmate, BC, from tormenting another student. In response, BC slapped DP. … This incident led to further teasing, including teasing from geography teacher John Redding, who asked DP later that same day in front of a full class of students: “[H]ow does it feel to be hit by a girl[?]” The class laughed at DP.

The harassment from his fellow students came in many forms, most of them anti-gay slurs and references to “Mr. Clean,” apparently referring to the student’s lack of pubic hair. The bullying was not merely verbal, however:

In March 2005, unknown students broke into DP’s gym locker, removed his clothes and urinated on them, and threw his tennis shoes in the toilet. The locker was also “covered with shaving cream spelling out sexually oriented words.” Later that spring, two students … hung a “Mr. Clean” poster on DP’s locker in the main hallway. …

At some point after the “Mr. Clean” incident, DP’s locker in the main hallway was vandalized by unknown students. These students used permanent markers and wrote words such as “gay,” “faggot,” and “queer” up and down the locker. Additionally, a picture of a penis being inserted into a rectum was drawn on the locker. The inside of the locker was also defaced with various derogatory phrases, such as “suck your mother’s tits” and “you suck dicks.”

And it even went so far as alleged sexual assault:

The final incident of harassment occurred in late May 2005. After Friday night junior-varsity baseball practice, DP was sexually assaulted by a fellow teammate, LP, in the locker room. LP stripped naked, forced DP into a corner, jumped on DP’s shoulders, and rubbed his penis and scrotum on DP’s neck and face. While the assault was occurring, another student, NH, blocked the exit so DP could not escape.

While the student was expelled for this and brought up on charges for the assault, the ruling reports that the baseball coach held a team meeting with DP present at which he told the students that they should “not joke around with guys who can’t take a man joke.”

The victim is so scarred by all of this that he can no longer set foot inside the school without suffering panic attacks, the ruling says.

Bullying “is a form of abuse”

The case will now go back to the district court for a full trial on whether the school “failed to implement and enforce meaningful procedures to ensure compliance with federal law and the policies of [Hudson] and failed to ensure the proper education and training of staff as to harassment issues.”

Terry Heiss, an Ada attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the case, told the Michigan Messenger that the family is grateful for the opportunity to have its day in court.

“I believe the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals effectively and carefully reviewed the record and did a good analysis … in this area,” Heiss said. “My clients are pleased with that analysis.”

Glenn Stutzky, an associate professor of social work at Michigan State University, was an expert in this case. He could not speak about the specifics of the case, but he did tell Messenger that bullying is a very serious problem in schools with extremely pernicious effects:

“The important thing to understand about bullying is that it’s a form of abuse,” Stutzkysaid. “And until we grasp that, we’re not going to be able to deal with it effectively. Bullying in schools is the same dynamic that occurs in domestic violence in the home. It’s exactly the same set of circumstances and interactions between two people in which violence and abuse are used to dominate and control another individual.

“The AMA has concluded that bullying impacts kids as much as child abuse, drug addiction and early sexual encounters,” he added.

The effects of such torment can include medical problems resulting from stress and anxiety, and eating and sleeping problems, as well as academic problems, Stutzky said.

“These are all now well documented in research,” he added. “But it can affect the entire school, because students pushed to extremes by such bullying may take their own life or may take the lives of their tormenters, as happened in the Columbine incident.”

Stutzky noted that this ruling comes close on the heels of the failure of a bill in the Michigan Legislature, Matt’s Safe School Law, that would have required schools to have programs to deal with bullying.

The bill was named for Matt Epling, a young man from East Lansing who took his own life in 2002 after serious hazing from classmates. As the Lansing State Journal reportedon Sunday, the bill had broad bipartisan support but was prevented from getting a vote in the state Senate by Majority Leader Alan Cropsey, R-Dewitt.

“The state Legislature had an opportunity to deal with this on a statewide basis and failed,” Stutzky said.

“The reality is that a lot of schools do not have any kind of specific policy dealing with bullying. And like with any other type of serious situation, we need good legislation to provide greater safety and a means for dealing with it when it does happen. We need this legislation passed so that the state stands up and recognizes that this is a serious problem and we need to address this.”