I recently saw a movie in which a bully tried to drown a kid. Like, literally tried to drown him, as in, to kill him, not to frighten or intimidate him.
Excluding such cases as bullied victims committing suicide, or gang-related killings of schoolchildren, has there ever been a case of a child or teenager being killed by a bully?
*I’m sure this has to have happened, but I’m totally drawing a blank.
If you mean someone who a bully deliberately killed, I don’t know.
But if you mean someone who a bully unintentionally killed, I think any case of death by hazing would count.
I think hazing is an exceptional form of bullying. At least in a fraternity, the victim is at least starts out as a willing participant. It certainly is bullying, don’t get me wrong, but the psychology is slightly different. I can’t quite put my finger on the difference though. In most cases, each class previous was hazed the same way, and there is a definite end to the hazing once the pledge becomes active. I’m not defending hazing, I’m just trying to show that there is a difference between that and bullying coworkers and classmates that have no choice to leave and no definable end.
Here’s one instance of a kid being killed by a couple of bullies.
Paradoxically, the first thing that comes up on Google when you run a search for ‘boy killed by bully’ is quite the reverse, a boy turning the tables and killing the bully who had been tormenting him.
In Canada, there was the very sad case of Reena Virk. She was 14 when she was beaten and then killed by bullies.
I know of an adult bully who punched another dad at a kids hockey game. The bully hit him so hard while on the ground and/or the other dad’s head hit the ground so hard it killed him. It got national attention and some Prime Time type shows covered it, too.
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20136284,00.html
The difference between bullying and hazing is that bullying is an act of exclusion, while hazing is, ultimately, an act of inclusion. Someone being hazed is doing so in order to join the group doing the hazing. While I wouldn’t defend the practice, it is really about acceptance: we’re doing this to you to make you one of us. Bullying is about rejection. It’s saying, “You’re on the outside, and you’re going to stay there, because you’re not good enough to be one of us.”
Recent case in my area a pair of local bullies(twin brothers) killed one of their regular victims. My friend was a local comic book shop owner and had a good understanding of the goings on. The victim was an occasional customer, he was regularly bullied by the two brothers. The brothers were known around town for their behavior. The victim could be described as ‘slow’ and people aware of what was going on would stand up for him occasionally. They instead picked on him more when they had opportunity. Their last attack on him they were beating him up and one decided to pick up a rock and hit the victims head with it repeatedly. There were witnesses to the event(them not doing anything is something else entirely). While the case has not cleared the court system yet, it would be difficult to argue they did not intend to kill him.
Good God, what a question!
A gay & lesbian kids is killed or driven to suicide every few months in this country.
Look up Lawrence King in California in February.
Carl Walker in Massachusetts in April.
Jaheem Herrera in Georgia in April.
There are lots more if you want to look further.
There’s always the story of Megan Meier… though her “bully” was a grown woman. She committed suicide.
If she committed suicide, then the bully didn’t kill her.
Sorry, I missed that in the OP… :smack:
Tom Junod wrote an article in Esquire–I believe it was entitled “The Bad Boy” but I can’t locate it online–about a kid who was in jail because he killed a fellow student in a fight. This might not be a perfect fit for the OP; while the kid was a classic bully, his victim (also a bit of a hell raiser) was actually more than a match for him and the death was clearly accidental, involving some slippage and hitting his head on something as a result of the fall. But yeah, it happens.
Oh, also: Leopold and Loeb. Also the sinister Liverpool kid about a decade ago.
Leopold and Loeb were bullies?
That’s the one I was thinking of.
There is also Myles Neuts, a 10-year-old from Chatham, Ontario who was found hanging from a coat hook in the boys’ bathroom. The two boys who had waited and ambushed him in the bathroom brought others in to watch him be slowly strangled. One of the other kids ran to get a teacher, but Neuts died in hospital a few days later.
Edit: And in the UK, a 15-year-old by the name of David Sandham was killed in a bullying incident in 2004.
They killed Bobby Franks, a smaller, weaker kid, so yeah. Are you saying they weren’t?
They weren’t bullies in the sense being discussed in this thread, unless you want to term all killers who kill children bullies. Leopold and Loeb set out to commit the perfect murder in a cold and clinical fashion. They were psychopaths not bullies.
I wouldn’t call them bullies. Just because they were (relatively) young, doesn’t make them anything but murderers. At least, as far as I understand the case, the victim was largely incidental, with the real intent being the ‘perfect crime’.
No, they pretty clearly weren’t. Bullying is about establishing social dominance, either in forcing the victim into a subservient position, or by demonstrating to your peers that you’re more powerful than the victim. Murdering someone in secret and attempting to hide your involvement has no social element to it at all - had their plan worked, no one would have known that Leopold and Loeb had done anything at all, so there would be no change in their social status among their peer group. And Franks being dead, he could not be subservient to them.