Babies Teach Empathy

In November 2011, a 15-year-old Nova Scotia girl was gang-raped. After someone used their cell phone to circulate a photo of the sexual assault, Rehtaeh Parsons endured more than a year of cyberbullying and harassment until she couldn't take it anymore. Rehtaeh was taken off life support on April 7, 2013 – three days after she tried to hang herself.
 
Rehtaeh's mother wrote on her Facebook tribute page, "Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought that raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun. All the bullying and messaging and harassment that never let up are also to blame. Lastly, the justice system failed her. Those are the people that took the life of my beautiful girl."

How can we prevent tragedies like these? An anti-bullying program that is gaining national attention centers on babies teaching empathy to young children. Roots of Empathy is a social and emotional learning program for K-8 students which started in Toronto. The mission of the program is to reduce aggressive behavior as a way of decreasing bullying. In 2007, the program was introduced to US schools, and has spread to California, New York, and parts of Washington.

Baby Claire visits a kindergarten class once a month, and a Roots of Empathy instructor also visits the classroom to help the students recognize Claire's development and label her feelings. The students then discuss why Claire is happy or sad, and how they have similar feelings.



A 2011 study of 270,000 students compared those students who participated in social and emotional learning programs like Roots of Empathy, with those who didn't. The study found that the students in these programs not only had increased social and emotional skills, but they also had an 11 percent increase in standardized achievement test scores.

Claire's mother says, "The tone of the room changes when Claire comes in, and I think kids start to think about how it feels to be treated a certain way, because they don't like it when she gets upset."

Free Speech or Online Harassment?

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to give schools guidance on where to draw the line between a student's free speech rights and online harassment. Litigants asked the Court to review decisions in three cases involving Internet speech that came to different results. Two cases involved students using the Internet to ridicule their principals, and the third case involved student-on-student online harassment.

By denying review, the Court let stand two lower court decisions that First Amendment free speech rights trump the schools' right to punish students for using social media to make derogatory statements about their principals.  And the third decision will stand upholding a school's right to suspend a student for online harassment of another student.

Free speech rights were protected where one student portrayed her middle school principal as a "hairy sex addict" and a pedophile because the claims were too outrageous to be taken seriously. In the second case, a student posted comments about a high school principal, calling him a "big steroid freak" and a drunk, but, since the student's online comments did not cause substantial disruption at school, they could not be punished by school administrators.

However, in the third case, free speech rights did not prevent a student's punishment for creating a website where she posted hateful comments about another student.  The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that her "particularly mean-spirited and hateful" conduct violated school anti-bullying policies that were necessary to preserve a safe educational environment at school.

The Internet has provided an especially virulent means to bully and harass, and the Court missed an opportunity to provide school administrators with valuable insight on how to navigate these troubled waters.

No One Listens

He blogged about school bullying and posted a hopeful YouTube video that was called "It Gets Better, I promise!" But during National Suicide Prevention Week, Jamey Rodemeyer committed suicide after enduring years of bullying.



In middle school, the bullies attacked him online with anonymous posts filled with hate. Just two days before he ended his life, Jamey posted a message that read, "I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens."

Jamey had just started ninth grade at Williamsville North High School, which had lost another student to suicide in February 2010. One of North High's social workers said, "We really encourage kids not to use those sites if they're having a hard time because it just aggravates the situation."

Successful anti-bullying strategies, however, involve the entire school community to create a safe environment for kids like Jamey.