The Pandora’s Box paradox




      It's so easy to target someone who is a bit       
  different. If only the bullies realised what 
tremendous cowards that makes them.

 
15 year old Jeffrey Scott Johnston killed himself after a three year Internet campaign orchestrated and carried out by a classmate called Robert Roemmick who to this day shows no remorse for what he drove a young boy to do.


Jeff’s mother has posed the question, which I paraphrase  here, “Knowing that he was only going to find pain and injury, why did Jeff keep logging on to the Internet?”

You could ask the same question of any person who is bullied via a dozen Internet technologies. You could even ask “Why do you keep looking at texts or answering the phone to people who you know will hurt you?”

Anyone who’s ever been bullied will be able to answer that question in an instant. There are several reasons:

Many kids woul rather take serious injury rather than
surrender in this situation. Defiance may be the last piece
of self-respect left to the victim

As soon as you allow the bullies to chase you out of your own world, then you’re truly defeated. If you’ve ever seen a bully hold down a kid, and torment them in some way to make the victim say what the bully wants, you’ll know that most victims will endure an inordinate amount of pain before finally surrendering. In fact, in that situation, many will take genuine injury, rather than surrender. Stubborn resistance is often the only dignity left to the chronically bullied. The last vestige of control over their own desitiny.



As a kid, I was beaten up at school and around my neighbourhood, and chased many, many times, but it when I was kept from my own backyard that I felt the most defeated and upset, because the confines of my world had contracted right up to my front door.

Now with internet bullying, even the home is no longer a refuge.

Up until the age of about 12, I had a terrifying fear of the dark. Many nights I literally lay in the dark hour upon hour, with my heart pounding, too scared to go get help; too scared to move in case I attracted the attention of the imaginary monsters that scared me. When I was young, I would hide under the covers, as the air I breathed got hotter and hotter, and staler and staler, feeling safer because I couldn’t be seen. But as I got older, I forced myself to stay above the covers – to stare into the darkness – to face my fears head on. I still felt the fear, but I somehow felt as though I had some small measure of control if a situation developed. I wasn’t passively buried, hoping not to feel a hand on my ankle – I was facing my demons.

So sometimes, although it’s painful to see and hear the hateful lies people might be saying about you, at least if you know what people are saying, you can try to fight it. A whispering campaign behind your back can destroy your life just as surely, with a million knives in the back. I respect Jeff Johnston for his approach. He had the courage to face his tormentors – to know his enemies. What he lacked, was the aggressive nature that would have allowed him to take the fight to them. It’s a characteristic of many sensitive kids.


It may seem to parents that kids who are Cyberbullied
hold the control over whether or not they
                return to the tormenting grounds, but it's not that simple...               

Gentleness, sensitivity, creativity and warmth are traits that most parents would cherish in their kids, and they’re characteristics that make for terrific adults. The only trouble is, they do leave the kids so much more emotionally vulnerable as they grow up.

When Deborah asks, “Why did Jeff keep going where he was bullied?” I ask her, in the kindest and least accusational possible way, “Why did you allow him to have a computer and free phone access, knowing that they were being used against him?”

And the answer to that brings me to my third reason why a victim would keep returning to the places where he will be victimised, and maybe it’s the hardest one to deal with. It’s because for some children, hope springs eternal. Even knowing that knowledge is like opening Pandora's box to all the evils and pain of bullying, that tiny flickering flame of optimism keeps drawing you back, in the hope that this time things will be different. And I suspect, for Jeffrey, it was when that tiny flame finally sputtered and died, that he felt the hopelessness engulfing him.

I remember the sad story of Ryan Halligan, who was bullied, but having finally stood up for himself against his tormentor, was instantly willing to forgive and forget when the other boy started to act in a friendly way. Ryan opened his heart and his innermost secrets to the boy, and the boy took those confidences and used them to destroy Ryan’s world and his very existence.



Perhaps it would be better to work prosaicly towards bullying resolution with your kids, rather
than leaving them to hope that the situation can be resolved with optimism and reason



I think that for some kids, the belief that the situation may be resolvable is what helps them to endure. So they continue to go where they are tormented, to listen to the words of those that hurt them, because they cling to the hope that if they could just find allies; if they could explain their point of view; if they could just detect a softening in the hate, then they could turn things around and finally end their torment. It’s a wonderful characteristic – the childlike innocence and belief that every situation is saveable. It’s also not true.

In a future article, I will be talking about “target hardening”; teaching our kids how to comport themselves so that they reduce the likelihood of becoming victims. But perhaps we also need to talk about “heart hardening” – toughening our kids’ hearts so that they have a more realistic belief in the ways of the world. Optimism is a powerful emotional state, and it can accomplish a lot, but it needs to be based in reality. So if you see your child clinging desperately to the hope that human decency will prevail, or that the bullies will move on to other victims, or that they can win them over with reason, perhaps you need to take control of the situation with action that targets the bullies’ present behaviour, rather than depending on a positive turn of events that your child could die hoping for. Because even hope has its sell-by date, and after that, sometimes all that is left is pain and despair…

Postscript

It’s particularly ironic that Jeffrey’s tormentor, Robert Roemmick now complains about verbal harassment from strangers on his Myspace and Facebook accounts. He declares, “I am done with this section of my life...

I wonder if he put it behind him before or after allegedly sending instant messages entitled “Boo hoo your son’s dead”? Or after allegedly starting websites to attack Jeffrey’s mother following the boy’s suicide? He further complains, “People who DIDN'T EVEN KNOW ME were harassing me through MySpace and Facebook”.  Welcome to Jeffrey’s world. Maybe your comments and your actions before and after Jeffrey’s death say all that anyone needs to know about you Robert. Looks like your birds have come home to roost.

I did invite Robert to put his side of the story, because it seemedthat there might be more to this than met the eye, but he has politely declined.

It’s also especially telling that having allegedly attacked Jeffrey’s sexuality, Robert now acknowledges that he himself is gay.  Was Robert trying to redirect attention, or was it, as he asserts, preposterous that he would attack Jeffrey for a trait he himself shared (if he was out at that time). Of course, the epithet "faggot", is often used without literal reference to a person's sexuality, so who knows? Jeffrey may have felt his masculinity being attacked, whilst Robert was simply being generically offensive.

To be honest, I had planned to write an extremely offensive concluding comment aimed at Robert here, but having briefly spoken to him, I didn't find him to be the beast he has been portrayed to be. He is polite, patient and respectful. He complains that every interview he and his friends have ever granted, has been cut and edited to fit the picture of them as tormentors.



 Robert Roemmick - merciless, cackling, gloating, in denial cyberbully
who hounded a young boy to his death, or something else?
Only he knows for sure, and he's not talking

I have sympathy for him on that. I know what a manipulative bunch of ammoral scum some journalists can be. On the other hand, again, I wonder if that was how Jeffrey felt, as his actions were portrayed by Robert and his friends, to fit this negative image they'd built of him. To hack away at someone for almost three years seems to me to betray a particularly vindictive and unpleasant personality. But what do I know? I wasn't there. Robert probably had a perfectly good reason to drive Jeffrey to his death. Like the fact that Jeff looked a bit different, wore black, or had long hair...

I very much wish that for the sake of balance, Robert would explain his side of the story, because no matter how pleasant he is now, I can't get it out of my head that he appears to feel absolutely no sadness or remorse that his words and actions, no matter how justified he may have felt them to be at the time, drove a boy to suicide. And if Robert really cares nothing about that, then he truly is psychopathic scum, and really shouldn't be free to walk around with decent people.