Beating The Bullies

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For Jokin Ceberio, the torture began in September 2003. He was 13 at the time, one of the new kids at Talaia High School in Hondarribia, a town in the Basque region of northern Spain. A gastrointestinal infection led to an embarassing bout of diarrhea in class, and several students began taunting and harassing him for sport. Then, last August, Ceberio and three friends were caught smoking hashish at a summer camp. When Ceberio's mother and father alerted the parents of the other children involved, the teenager's friends labeled him a snitch and allegedly began roughing him up. In September, classmates marked the "anniversary" of Ceberio's bowel trouble by festooning his desk with toilet paper. "He was the school punching bag," says Ceberio's father, José Ignacio Ceberio.

Ceberio refused to name his tormenters. When his mother insisted, he pleaded with her: "What do you want? Do you want them to beat my brains out?" On Sept. 17, he finally relented and his parents met with the parents of the alleged bullies two days later. On Sept. 21, Ceberio was supposed to return to school, equipped with a cell phone in case he ran into trouble. Instead, he climbed to the top of the medieval stone wall that surrounds Hondarribia's old quarter and threw himself off. He died instantly.

Variations on Ceberio's story are playing themselves out with depressing regularity across Europe, though only rarely with fatal results. While the relentless teasing, harassment and violence that constitute bullying are not new, the behavior is growing both more pervasive and more emotionally and physically aggressive — and it is affecting increasingly younger children. In Spain around 7% of kids between 9 and 16 are victims of extreme bullying. A 2000 report on what many Spanish experts call "abuse among equals" in secondary schools noted that the country's "classrooms, school playgrounds, hallways and bathrooms ... often become regular sites for violent episodes." In France, almost 13% of students say they've been the target of multiple bullying incidents, while the number of violent incidents in schools — including verbal attacks, fighting and theft, as well as bullying — rose from 72,000 during the 2002-03 school year to 81,000 one year later. In Germany, the percentage of pupils who say they've been involved in physical violence has doubled within a generation, from 5% in the 1970s to 10% today. "The threshold has been lowered substantially," says Werner Ebner, a former teacher in the town of Riederich in southern Germany. "Kids resort to physical violence much more readily." In late November in South Wales, cancer surviver Bianca Powell, 12, suffered minor burns when a bully set fire to her hair, which had just grown back after four years of chemotherapy. That same month, the National Confederation of Parent-Teacher Associations, a British national education charity, released results of a survey that reflects growing concerns about bullying. Of the 1,682 British parents surveyed, 21% said their children had been bullied at school in the past year; of those, 57% were attacked verbally and 27% physically.