by Robert Gillis
published in the Foxboro Reporter 4/2001 and in 2005 and the Boston City Paper 2006

The sound is so loud that his brain can’t comprehend what is happening.

The window is exploding, shattering, coming toward him. Glass—glass everywhere. There’s no metaphor to describe it; it’s just horribly, painfully, incomprehensibly loud.

The moment is so traumatic that his brain can’t process it. It doesn’t make sense. All he knows is absolute terror.

A few minutes before, he’d went to his bedroom, dug out that old battered copy of freshmen Algebra, and sat at the little table in front of the window to begin his homework. Either by divine intervention or dumb luck, he decided his bed was more comfortable and went there to start the math problems.

Then the room exploded.

He’s still screaming as his parents race into his room.

“Somebody broke my window!” There’s shiny glass everywhere, big pieces, little bits, covering the floor. Then he discovers the two fist-sized rocks that had come to rest under his bed after shattering the double windowpanes.

It’s only then that it occurs to him that he was sitting in front of the window seconds before it came in toward him. The rocks could have easily hit him, blinded him, the glass could have cut him, disfigured him.

He just might have been killed.

The police are called but they are useless. “Did you steal someone’s girlfriend?” one of them asks, with a smirk on his face. A report isn’t even filed. There’s not much we can do, they tell him.

His father clears the glass and seals the window in plastic. They decide not to immediately repair the window, in case the rock throwers come back. In the spring, his dad will replace the window with a piece of Plexiglas.

The boy—all of 14 — never feels safe in that room again. He thinks back, months before the window exploded. He was the smartest kid in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade and wasn’t a fighter—and that made him a target.

He wasn’t really that different; he was a nice kid, affable, and had friends.

But there were the bullies. The clique. They picked on others, too, but he was a favorite target. Probably because he never fought back, he just took it or ran away. Took the long way home.

It wasn’t so much the actual abuse—before the window, that only happened a few times—it was the constant threat of abuse over three years that kept him scared for so long. He continued to do well in school although he hated going there.

He wasn’t a coward; he just didn’t want to fight. His dad, a product of his generation, told him he should fight back, his mother offered to speak to the teachers but he said no, he didn’t want to be a fink.

Twenty years go by, the boy does well in high school and college, gains self-confidence and happiness, makes good friends, gets married, and holds a good job. He loves his life and those around him.

But sometimes he still remembers the horrible sound of the breaking glass.

And as the years go by, he realizes how commonplace the cycle of violence is.

He reads about a teen-ager named Shaun Oulette, a quiet kid who from all reports never bothered anyone, who is murdered by a classmate who wanted to feel what is was like to kill someone.

He reads about Matthew Shepherd, beaten, humiliated and murdered because he was gay.

He reads about the massacre at Columbine High School that left 13 dead.

He reads that a 15-year-old girl is in a critical condition, and five other pupils injured, following a shooting at Heritage High School, near the town of Conyers, east of Atlanta in Georgia.

He reads about Santana High School and the 15-year-old who shot two others dead.

His goddaughter tells him that she’s afraid to go to school because the kids call her the N-word and beat her up because she has slightly darker skin than they do.

At work, his friend Mark tells him how his son has requested that he be transferred to another school—the bullies won’t leave him alone. Mark, a good father, will do as his son has asked.

He types in “school shootings” on a search engine on the Internet and gets hundreds of results. All occurred in the last few years.

Often, kids who were clearly unbalanced cause the violence. Other times, there seems to be no motive for the bloodshed.

But read closer. Many times the violence is caused by a kid who has “pushed too far” by other kids. The kids who the bullies were preying on; the ones who don’t fight back, or the ones who don’t wear the latest fashions, or the ones who are different. The threats or actual abuse went on too long, became too much to bear, so one day the kid goes to school with a loaded gun.

The violence in the schools doesn’t start with the shootings and the stabbing; a lot of it often starts with intimidation, cruelty and bullying. It starts with feeling like an outsider. Being the target. Wanting to make it stop. Make them leave you alone.

So many news stories. So many injured and dead kids. People have been wringing their hands in despair. What can we do? How do we protect our children?

One of the answers is that the organized bullying and attacks must stop.

A cursory search of the Internet reveals nearly 2000 sites dedicated to the subject of school bullies. One of the more impressive sites, The Colorado Institute for Conflict Resolution and Creative Leadership reported that, “Bullying is another hidden element of the culture of violence that contributes to the kind of school violence that happened at Columbine High School. From first hand accounts … and from the killers own videos we know that Harris and Klebold were repeatedly bullied and subjected to verbal put-downs, leading directly to their plan of violent revenge.” They go on to say “… violence always travels from the strongest to the weakest or from the most powerful to the least powerful. People who are the object of violence absorb it, modify it and then pass it on. Young children, who are at the bottom of this vortex, often do not have anyone to pass it on to so they absorb it, accumulate it and wait until they are old enough, big enough, or strong enough to erupt in some dramatic way that hurts other people.”

The statistics they cite, corroborated all over the World Wide Web, are chilling:

• Bullying is pervasive in most schools.
• One-half of all violence against teenagers occurs in school buildings, on school property or on the street in the vicinity of the school. Most begins as bullying or put-downs
• The National School Safety Center estimates that there are over 525,000 attacks, shakedowns, and robberies per month in public secondary schools in this country
• The NEA estimates that 160,000 students miss school every day or 28 million missed days per year, due to fear of attack or intimidation by a bully
• Students receive an average of 213 verbal put-downs per week, or 30 per day
• In a survey of 558 students in a Midwestern middle school, the researchers found that 80 percent of the students had engaged in bullying behaviors in the previous 30 days
• 80 to 90 percent of adolescents report some form of victimization from a bully at school 90 percent of all students felt that bullying caused social, emotional, or academic problems for those students who were bullied
• 69 percent of all students believe that schools respond poorly to bullying and victimization

There can be many horrible after affects of bullying, including low self-esteem that lasts for many years, depression, the victim committing acts of violence as revenge, and suicide.

There are many that would argue that kids must learn to fight back, that dealing with schoolyard bullies is some rite of passage. That’s garbage. In the adult world, you don’t resort to violence when you don’t like someone or don’t get your way. The adults who do are called criminals. The adults who do so go to jail.

There is no excuse for organized, constant cruelty. In countless schools, the story is the same: Consistent patterns of intimidation, threats, and discrimination. Kids who literally live in fear. Kids terrified to go to school. It’s in nearly every school. In every state. And it’s getting much worse, much more violent. These days, kids are being killed, or doing the killing.

So what can we do?

A start would be to teach children that respect for others is REQUIRED of them. That bullying and intimidation will not be tolerated, ever. The teachers and parents must be involved. If that doesn’t bring resolution, then it’s time to involve the police. There should be zero tolerance for this type of behavior.

Another way to deal with these types of situations is the use of peer mediation programs and school wide conflict resolution classes. More importantly, kids need to learn the difference between “being a fink” and reporting a dangerous situation.

The boy whose window was broken is the man who now writes these words. To this day I have no idea who broke my window. Over twenty-five years later, I still have a “hyper startle reflex” to loud noises.

I’d be lying if I said I have forgiven whoever broke my window. It was an act of violence. It was a violation. Sadly, compared to what I read in the papers these days, I’m clearly one of the lucky ones. I’m still alive.

If I could go back in time and do it all over, I would have reported the abuse on day one. I would have escalated it every single time it happened. I would have asked my parents to be involved—both of them. I would have told the teachers and principal.

Of course, that’s 25 years hindsight, 25 years too late. But I’m not that scared child anymore, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it happen to anyone else. I will continue to encourage parents to get more involved with their kids. I want to see this cycle of violence, this stupid “rite of passage” stopped.

Parents, encourage your kids to tell you, a teacher, or another adult when they’re having a problem with other students. Catch the problem early, before the situation escalates. Deal with it swiftly and decisively. Children simply do not possess the skills or ability to deal with the situation effectively.

Your first responsibility is to your children is to protect them, even if they ask you not to get involved.

There’s been enough violence. There’s been enough trauma. There’s been enough bloodshed.

Let’s stop the cycle now.