This story originally published on May 23, 2021 in the (Binghamton, N.Y.) Press & Sun-Bulletin.
Debbie Larnerd has read her daughter’s suicide note more times than she can remember, but she knows so many of her questions will never be answered.
A note scrawled on a piece of notebook paper and addressed to “everyone” sheds some light on why her 14-year-old daughter chose to hang herself from a ladder on the back porch more than a year ago. It indicates Miranda felt bullied by her peers.
“… for every good person in my life, there were 10 more to bring me down everyday,” she wrote.
Miranda, a freshman at Tioga Central High School, who had frequently changed schools, went on to say “every school I’ve gone to everyone hated me, so there must be something wrong with me.” But she never said who was harassing her.
Miranda represents one of a seemingly increasing number of young people who have taken their own lives after being mistreated or neglected by their peers — a phenomenon becoming so widespread it’s been dubbed “bullycide.”
Miranda’s parents agree it wasn’t just bullying that pushed her to the edge. She was depressed, they said. So much so that she was seeing counselors.
“Both of them felt she was nothing more than a teenage girl with teenage girl problems,” Miranda’s father, Rick Larnerd, said.
Experts in the field say that’s why bullying can be so dangerous bullies pick on weaker, often-times depressed, students.
“A lot of these kids were vulnerable to begin with,” said Mary Muscari, an associate professor at Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing, who has written several parenting books that deal with bullying. “It’s why they’ve been targeted — because they’re vulnerable. Now, did the bullying push them over the edge? It may have been the precipitating factor that pushed them over the edge, but it probably was a combination of tilings. We certainly do know … that bullying definitely does play a role.”
That’s why, as part of a bullying study made possible by a partnership between Binghamton University and the Union-Endicott school district, researchers made a point to look at whether children recognized signs of depression and anxiety in their peers.
“So we know that peers are hugely important to kids, obviously,” said Brandon Gibb, a Binghamton University psychology professor who helped conduct the study. “We know as kids get older they spend more and more time with their peers than they do with their parents, or teachers, or with anybody else. So, what we looked at was kids’ ability to recognize mental health problems in kids their own age. We gave them stories of kids who were either doing OK or had clinically significant depression or anxiety disorders and we said do you think this kid has a problem or not?”
Nearly two-thirds of students recognized the problem and said they’d recommend their peer seek help, said Meredith Coles, another BU psychology professor who assisted with the study. One-third said they just didn’t know what to recommend to a peer.
Coles said this provides evidence that there is room for improvement in mental health literacy education.
The U-E study, orchestrated by means of anonymous questionnaires to more than 2,800 students in the U-E district, revealed 23 percent — nearly one of every four students — felt bullied and 15 percent of students had bullied others.
Bullying showed a spike in both second- and eighth-graders, said Union-Endicott Superintendent Suzanne McLeod, who partnered with the university to bring the study to her school district In second-graders, the bullying is more physical and a matter of children learning appropriate social skills. By the time students get to the eighth grade, “everybody is basically doing it” and it’s more relational, or verbal, McLeod said.
“I taught eighth grade for 13 years, and what they say about hormones and middle school and teenage years — all of that goes together,” McLeod said. “However, it doesn’t mean we can’t use this data to effectively address these issues.”
Though bullying is difficult to track, McLeod and the researchers were hopeful the results would be accurate because the survey provided anonymity. Statewide, statistics show a variance in number of bullying incidents, which schools are required to report to the New York State Education Department along with other violent and disruptive incidents.
Among the schools with some of the highest numbers in the Southern Tier is Benjamin Franklin Elementary School withll6 incidents of intimidation, harassment or bullying during the 2007-08 school year, the most recent statistics available. The school has the sixth most incidents in the state for that time period. Calls to the principal were not returned.
Other schools of note include Cortland Junior-Senior High School with 53 reports and Norwich, in Chenango County, with 50 reports. In Broome County, Johnson City high and middle schools top the list with 35 and 39 reports, respectively.
Studies from the national institute of health vary largely, estimating from 30 to 77 percent of students have been victims of bullying.
A community approach
While almost every school has an anti-bullying policy as part of its code of conduct, that’s not enough, experts say. Unless the program is appropriate and carried out children will continue to harass each other.
Just months before 15-year-old Phoebe Prince hung herself in her South Hadley, Mass, home after being tormented for months by classmates, the school brought in Barbara Coloroso, an internationally recognized consultant to give a seminar about prevention and reporting of bullying following the suicide of a Springfield, Mass, boy. After Prince’s death, Coloroso returned to South Hadley, later noting the school had not fully carried out her recommendations.
McLeod said after a publicized case of a Missouri student’s suicide, she decided last year she wanted to partner with BU to find out exactly what was going on in her district.
“It is something that I would say unilaterally that we have a problem within our school districts,” she said, adding the concern always nags her because it affects so many aspects of the students’ lives.
“What the research provided for us was … rather than go on our adult gut instincts, the kids spoke to us.”
McLeod hopes to use the findings to implement the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program district-wide. The program resulted from several large-scale studies of students in Norway, and spans the school, classroom and community. It includes spreading anti-bullying messages, not only in school but throughout the community, training staff how to deal with bullying and a decrease of bullying incidents by up to 45 percent after four years of implementation The district has applied for grants to help implement the program in her district but McLeod said she’s already noticed changes among students.
“While we haven’t yet begun the Olweus program, just by virtue of going through the survey and anti-bully-ing is internationally a of bullying following to not she … and up implement and presenting the data … the kids are much more comfortable in coming forward and saying, ‘hey, someone is bullying me,”‘ she said ‘7ust that level of awareness on part of the adults and approach.”
Experts say just by showing the lines of communication are open, children are far more likely to come forward.
“To develop healthy relationships (anti-bullying programs) can’t just be the 30 minutes of sitting in this thing once a week,” Muscari said. “That doesn’t do anything. They sit there because they have to, and they’re not paying attention. They couldn’t care less. They do what they gotta do and get out of there. It has to be something that has meaning. There has to be a sense of community within die school, and it has to be a big picture. We always think of the bully and the victims, but we’ve got to bring the bystanders in — the people who stand around and don’t do anything about it They’re just as guilty as the bully.
“So that’s what we really need to work on, what schools need to work on getting them strong enough to stop it.”
An important element of the Olweus program is schools reaching out to the community and to parents. If parents are tipped off that bullying or problems are going on at home, they’ll be better equipped to look for issues at home and vice versa.
“Everybody just kind of has to work as a team, ’cause it does take a village to raise a child,” Muscari said.
Another approach that has proven effective for officials at Binghamton High School is rewarding kindness. Principal Albert Penna brought a reward system — the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support program — to the school last spring. It has resulted in 25 percent fewer discipline referrals, he said.
When officials see students doing a positive deed, they reward them by recognizing them during announcements, or giving them free ice cream or pizza parties.
“The positive praise that they get is an award in and of itself,” Penna said. “It counters the bullying.”
Horseheads Elementary School developed an activity-based program in recent years called Raider Way, which helps to teach positive values and characteristics to students.
Sara Vondracek, the school’s psychologist said she believes kids have learned to feel better about themselves, their classmates and teachers, and their school and community. One way that’s demonstrated, she said, is a reduction in bullying.
“The program connects kids with adults and with other kids in meaningful ways beyond academics,” Vondracek said. “It fosters caring about others, for example.”
Another activity-based program that has helped counter bullying nationwide is Club Ophelia. The program, which has been implemented by Binghamton High School and the district’s middle schools, groups girls — bullies and victims alike — in an after-school setting to participate in an arts-based curriculum. Counselors, a community volunteer and high school mentors oversee the program and help to foster positive relationship skills among girls, who are typically more likely to harbor relational aggression.
“Over 10 weeks, you can see a difference in these girls,” said Binghamton West Middle School Counselor Mary Ellen Niefer, who helps supervise the program. “Some of them become friends, girls who you never would have seen together before are sitting next to each other in the cafeteria.”
Detrimental consequences
While not every child who is bullied is driven to such tragic measures as Miranda Larnerd Phoebe Prince and many other teens who’ve made headlines across the country, the consequences can be detrimental and long-lasting.
“Years from now, (bullies) don’t remember how many kids they picked on because they were just objects to them,” Muscari said. “Whereas, the victims could probably remember in full detail some of the things that happened to them like they happened yesterday because they were so traumatic.”
A Horseheads woman, whose son was bullied when he was in school, said even at 45 he suffers from the effects.
“It destroyed his self-confidence,” she said, adding he was tormented because he suffered from Tourette syndrome, a disorder that caused him to have uncontrolled vocal and facial tics starting when he was about 7 years old.
An Elmira woman, who also asked to remain anonymous, said her grandson has been bullied this year so badly at Elmira Free Academy that he doesn’t want to go to school anymore
“He went to Hendy (Elementary School) last year,” she said. “He loved his teacher there. Now he doesn’t even want to go to school anymore I hate to see it happen.”
Many others called with stories of their children being bullied, but didn’t want to speak on the record, or allow their names to be used, out of fear the bullying would get worse.
When Lisa Stone, of Horseheads, discovered her 6-year-old daughter was being bullied and abused at school by another first-grader, she worried it would have harmful effects on her child. “It continued on to the point where the child pushed my daughter down and then kicked her while she was down,” Stone said. “I was getting fearful she was going to push her off the playground equipment and my daughter might seriously get hurt.”
Though Stone said school administrators first told her touching was how 6-year-olds express themselves, she persisted until the principal met with both families in March. The bullying has ceased since and Stone s daughter is getting counseling once a week.
“I was very concerned about her self-esteem, because she’s gotten kind of self-conscious and I though that’s pretty odd for a 6-year-old to be self-conscious,” Stone said. “That was my main concern, besides the actual physical harm.”
Adolescents don’t yet have an adult mind and are far more likely than adults to be self-conscious they feel like everyone’s always looking at them and knowing what they’re doing, Muscari said. That’s why harsh words and abuse can seem magnified for victims of bullying.
Shortly before her death, Miranda started to obsess over what she wore to school, Rick Larnerd said. Her mother recalls how the once-avid photographer, who also loved to be photographed, hid her face with a balloon weeks before she died. Neither parent knows the extent of how much their daughter was bullied, but both have questioned how serious the harassment was.
“It just goes back to the good old-fashioned treat others how you want to be treated,”‘ Debbie Larnerd said. “… it’s just, be kind. I don’t know to the extent, but it seems like there was some kind of bullying going on. Not like they’ve been showing on TV, nothing physical, but she felt it. Obviously.”