Bullycide: Our Next Mission Field

The National Association For The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used to hang a shocking banner from its offices in downtown Manhattan: "Another Black Man Was Lynched Today." 

We need a similar reminder, banners today that announce another kind of lynching that reads: "Another Child Committed Bullycide Today." 

They do so today by hanging themselves in their bedroom closet, sometimes using their father's tie or an extension cord stolen from another part of their home. They do so because they no longer believe in hope or justice.

Right now, the city of Atlanta is reeling from the bullycide of 11-year-old Jaheem Herrera, who hung himself in his room after he gave his mother a high-five in celebration of his  good report card. Reports strongly suggest that Jaheem was the recipient of ongoing bullying that was both physical and verbal. Since Jaheem's suicide, other students' parents have come forward to describe even more alleged acts of violence at their school. Some parents said their children were also the victims of beatings with buckles and chokings. Some brave citizens have even protested outside of the school where Jaheem played, studied and was bullied.

Jaheem's suicide continues to reverberate nationally. It occurred within weeks after an 11-year-old boy in Massachusetts hanged himself after being bullied and taunted at school. A child just outside of Chicago, Iain Steele, suffered  a similar fate this summer. He, too, took his own life (The Protectors Prayer Partners prays for bullied children throughout the world and the families of children who commit bullycide. To join the Protectors Prayer Partners, go to www.theprotectors.org).

There are many relevant questions that encircle such desperate acts of despair, cruelty and rage gone inward. But one that is not being asked, one that is the missing piece to the epidemic of bullying, is: Where were the Christian children who went to church, who saw what was happening to Jaheem and so many others, and why is there  no report that they did anything to help them? 

For some, the experience of bullying leads to one of two extremes: taking their own life and taking the life of others. Every school shooter in America has been male, and almost all of them were targets of ongoing bullying. They murdered others because their own worth and dignity as made in the image of God were being lynched and murdered within them, and hardly anyone came to their defense.

Sometimes the sound of a bullet ripping through a school's hallway is the language of the unheard, the unloved, the neglected, scorned and abused. Sometimes it is the plea of a young person at the end of his rope, of someone who can no longer bear the daily humiliation set around his neck like the millstone that it is.

Sometimes a school shooting, though never justified, is the language we hear when people of faith settle for low-level goodness, when they fail to acknowledge their God-given conscience and do the right thing and love those who are different and unlovely, the way our King of Kings and the Lord of Lords did on our behalf while we were still yet sinners.

School shootings are needless, destructive, wicked and evil. And so are the circumstances that have created almost all of them, conditions that lead so many to confusion, hatred, hopelessness and rage. As we condemn such horrible acts of violence, whether by bullycide or homicide, we must also condemn the horrible acts of violence that preceded them. 

Every time we mourn another death due to bullying, we should also mourn how hundreds of thousands of children are beat up daily across our great country--and yet hardly anyone of faith, or at least a veneered claim to faith, confronts their own cowardice to defend them. 

Abraham Lincoln wrote that unless a person's religion makes him treat an animal better, he wanted nothing to do with that man's religion. Likewise, unless our  faith compels us to defend the dignity of a target of bullying, what good is our religion? Does the spirit of God really live within us? If so, where's the proof? 

Almost every death due to bullying should be viewed, not as an isolated and mystifying experience, but as a time bomb with a very long and battered fuse, a fuse comprised of cruelty on behalf of bullies and cowardice on behalf of bystanders, most of whom claim to be Christian by doctrine but who cannot claim this exalted title by deed.