School Bullying Council

A chubby Australian boy has rocketed to YouTube stardom after a classmate recorded a cell phone video of him body-slamming a smaller boy who’d been taunting him in the schoolyard.

The clip shows the apparent bully, seventh-grader Ritchard Gale, teasing and punching his victim, Casey Heynes, as a gang of other kids laugh at the abuse. Heynes, who is in the 10th grade, takes the bullying for a while, but then snaps and picks Gale up and throws him down on the concrete floor. Gale eventually gets up and limps away.

Both boys were suspended from their school, Chifley College in New South Wales, outside Sydney. Gale’s mother has demanded an apology for the body-slamming of her son, and the bad publicity her family has received because of the YouTube video. But public support seems to be overwhelmingly on the side of Heynes, whose father said he’d been bullied for years without fighting back.

“People pick on him every single day. They hit him around and stuff, and he just got sick of it and let out the anger,” an unnamed classmate of the two boys told Australia’s Telegraph newspaper.

More than 100,000 people have joined a Facebook group defending Heynes, with some dubbing him “Casey the Punisher” and Gale, “Ritchard the Rat.” The global computer hacker group Anonymous also rushed to Heynes’ defense, launching what it dubbed “Operation Fat Hero” in which it hacked into the website of the boys’ school, Chifley College, and posted a manifesto accusing teachers of “failing to provide a violence-free environment for their students.”

Heynes’ YouTube video and Facebook group have drawn more attention in recent days to the problem of childhood bullying worldwide. Last week, President Barack Obama opened a White House conference on boosting anti-bullying programs in U.S. schools.

“With big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune,” Obama told about 150 students, parents and teachers gathered at the White House last Thursday. “I didn’t emerge unscathed.”

Obama also announced the creation of a new government website to address bullying concerns: StopBullying.gov

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/18/youtube-hero-australian-boy-casey-heynes-body-slams-his-bully/

Q: So, because it is a hidden act…

A: This is Allison (Orr): Just so you know how we make the decision when to use hidden cameras, everything is a case by case basis. There is no hard and fast rule. The decision is made by a lot of people here before we set out on any project. We talk about it and say what we hope to get out of it. It has to be important. There has to be kind of no other way to see what we’re going to do. There are a few criteria, but there’s not really a hard and fast rule. But one of them is always, “Well, is that what we need to do in order to tell the story, in order to show what we need to show?” And with bullying because of everything Kate just said about how it doesn’t really happen in front of adults, that was one of the reasons for this. But there is no hard and fast rule. We go into every single situation, saying, “Should we, or shouldn’t we? And these are the reasons why.”

Q: You guys looked to be very careful to be protective of the real kids in that situation… And there are a couple of situations. One girl gets very upset and …

A: (Snow): I don’t want to sound like we’re holier than thou — that we’re perfect angels or anything. But we put a lot of heart into this project. We talked and thought and had conference calls and meetings and discussions over a period of what, guys, months, three, four months now? This is planning before we ever started shooting, because we’re all mothers. Actually, I think everybody on our team is a parent — whether they’re a guy or a girl, they’re all parents. And we were very, very conscious of making sure this is a positive experience for everybody.

A: This is Lynn. Yes, we actually  gameplayed beforehand all the possible scenarios that we could think of as to what could happen — including what would happen if someone did get upset, because bullying can be very upsetting to witness. And we decided right there, that if we witnessed it, we were going to stop it — stop the whole thing.

A: (Snow) So, Dylan is the actor who plays the victim in the boys’ scenario. He happens to be gay in his real life. As you see on TV, he was tormented as a kid. He ended up actually dropping out of school, I think, at one point, because he was so bullied as a kid. At one point during our shoot, he was starting to internalize this stuff so much, it was hard. It was hard to act this over and over again. Even though he’s an actor, he’s a child…

A: (Crosstalk with Orr and Keller): He’s a teen, not a child.

A: (Snow) He’s a teen. But to go in there and put yourself through being bullied over and over is kind of a hard thing for an adult to do, for anybody to do. So, there was a point where we just stopped for a while. We took a break, because we said, “You know what, the way you’re feeling right now is more important than television.” And we had experts with us every step of the way. We were really careful. I’m not an expert. I’m not a bullying expert. I’m not a psychologist…. We wanted to be responsible.”

Q. You know, I wondered how else you could have done this — maybe with an undercover kid using an iPhone?

A: This is Lynn. We definitely went down the road you’re going, like how could we somehow be in the real world [to investigate without staging], and the bottom line is that you have to have the permission of the parents and the school…

Q: You’re very careful in the show to tell the viewer they are going to hear some language that might be problematic. Did you have concerns about replicating language that could be troubling to some? … Did you have discussions about that, too?

A: This is Allison. Big, big discussions. We went over the specfic words… What are the words we should have our actors use? Obviously, we came down on the side that you have to use the words the kids really use to tell the story.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2011/03/dateline_kate_snow_bullying_mo.html