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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.
Bullies are increasingly resorting to technology, too, such as sending offensive text messages or recording incidents on video. Between September 2003 and February 2004, 11 students at a school in Hildesheim in northern Germany regularly beat and humiliated a classmate, forcing him to kiss their shoes, eat chalk and masturbate. They filmed some of the incidents and circulated the footage via e-mail. "It's an increase in the level of perfidy," says Klaus Hurrelmann, professor of sociology at Bielefeld University. "The victims can no longer save face through silence."
As the number and seriousness of incidents increases, many parents worry that the problem is spiraling out of control. They are demanding that schools and policymakers do something — and in response, governments and educational authorities are devising new ways to tackle the problem: giving children strategies to avoid being picked on, and giving teachers more training to deal with the perpetrators.
To make a difference, though, authorities must first understand why bullying is burgeoning now. That's not easy, since its worst forms happen during the early teen years, just when most youths stop talking to their elders. "Young people can be very secretive," says Gerard McAleavy, an education professor at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "It's part of their struggle to construct their own identity." Peter Niebling, headmaster of a high school in Hanover, suggests the trend toward smaller families may play a role. "Many children have no siblings and thus don't know how to interact and coexist with their peers in school," he says.
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It took a lot for Hürter to summon the courage to tell her mom what was going on. "It's very hard to talk about these things," she says quietly, "even to your own mother." Together, they decided it was time for Hürter to speak to her teachers. The school's reaction was swift. Hürter's head teacher first gave the class a dressing-down, and then told them he would resign if the problem didn't stop. That brought the more severe bullying to a halt, but most of Hürter's classmates still don't interact with her.
Not every student can count on such decisive action. Meredith's son Adam, 14 (both mother's and son's names have been changed), attends a private boarding school in the English countryside. Classmates repeatedly pick on Adam for being small for his age and a vegetarian; they deliberately bump into him and vandalize his property. Meredith says Adam's school simply pretends there's no problem. "I've made dozens of phone calls but no one ever gets back to me," she says. "It's as if he doesn't exist." School officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Even when there are official policies to tackle bullying, many teachers feel unprepared to deal with the problem. In France, Germany and Britain, students can be expelled for bullying, although that tends only to move the problem to another school. Teachers need help — because they don't always know the best strategies. In a 2001 survey of 66 Czech grade schools, 85% of teachers demonstrated that they had little idea how to resolve a bullying problem: the best solution, they said, was to bring together perpetrator and victim. Bad move, says Michal Kolar, chairman of the Prague-based Society Against Bullying, who describes that technique as like "trying to confront a cobra with a mouse." Instead, he says, teachers should isolate the victim from the oppressor.
After three high-profile episodes in 1999 in which one child shot himself, another had a nervous breakdown and a third was threatened with drowning by classmates, the Czech government funded a pilot program to combat bullying in schools. Conducted in 2002 and 2003, the program found that a comprehensive approach — training the entire school staff, educating families, bringing in police and local counseling groups, and beefing up supervision of both school and nonschool activities — could reduce the incidence of bullying by up to 75% within four months.
Others are also experimenting with prevention strategies. In the U.K., the antibullying charity Kidscape hosts seminars to teach young people techniques to deal with their tormentors. At one recent event in London, 13 kids between 12 and 15 gathered in a church hall to share their experiences. Of the 13, four had been physically attacked and six had resorted to or were considering self-harm. At the seminar, the strategies to combat bullying included "fogging," in which children imagine they are surrounded by a dense mist that insults cannot penetrate, and the "broken record" technique, which teaches kids to say no to their tormentors without escalating the situation. Parents should look out for warning signs. Signals that a child is being bullied may include creating excuses not to go to school, or suddenly getting bad grades. Such a child should be asked directly if he or she is being bullied; if the answer is yes, a school official must be notified. Schools are best placed to interview both sets of parents, and can also take steps to break up bullying groups or keep bullies after school. If the bullying is about a specific issue (such as divorce, disfigurement or illness), teachers can launch an education program on the issue.
But many experts believe governments must ultimately get involved. Says ex-teacher Ebner: "The question [for politicians] is: Are you going to sit back and breed the future generation of head cases?"
The Jokin Ceberio case in Spain gives his comment a chilling urgency. Basque Ministry of Education officials say that Talaia, along with dozens of other schools, had planned to implement a program this year on "Education for Peace and Living Together." The initiative sought "to apply a conscientious and critical approach to the problems that come up in community living, as well as to promote respect and collaboration in the classrooms and the schools." Perhaps, some believe, if they had put in place the program sooner, Ceberio would still be alive.
The teenager was laid to rest on Sept. 23, but the reverberations from his death will be felt in Spain for years. So far, eight children who allegedly bullied Ceberio face preliminary charges of "induction to suicide," but legal experts say this charge is unlikely to stick. And some of Ceberio's fellow students say there's plenty more blame to go around. At a memorial march on Oct. 30, Andrea Azkune, one of Ceberio's friends, said: "When we look at the wall, we will say, 'A friend, a child, a 14-year-old child jumped from up there.' But he didn't commit suicide. He was suicided. We all suicided him."
- JENNIE JAMES
- How Europe is fighting back against school bullies