School Bullying Council

“Bully,” an upcoming documentary about the nation’s teen-bullying epidemic, would exclude much of its intended school-aged audience if the Motion Picture Association of America refuses to ease its R rating, according to Katy Butler, a bullying victim who hopes to change the board’s mind.

Butler posted a petition at Change.org to get signatures in support of a PG-13 rating for “Bully.” By Thursday at 11:00 a.m. ET, the tally was 156,230 and counting. The film is scheduled to open in theaters March 30, according to the film’s website.

The film’s producer and director, Lee Hirsch, praised Butler’s courage in heading the viral campaign to see that junior-high and high school students have freer access to his film. It ends with a plea from David Long, whose son Tyler committed suicide following “years of relentless bullying.”

When she was a seventh grader, Butler suffered a broken finger when male bullies called her names, pushed her into a wall and slammed a locker on her hand. She is now a junior at Greenhills School, a college prep school in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“I held back tears while I watched them run away laughing. I didn’t know what to do so I stood there, alone and afraid,” Butler wrote in a letter on her Change.org petition web page, ” MPAA: Don’t let the bullies win! Give ‘Bully’ a PG-13 instead of an R rating!”
in which she explained her desire to make sure more youngsters would be able to see the film in theaters and in schools. Education about bullying is considered key to prevention.

Last week, the MPAA ratings board rejected, by one vote, an appeal from The Weinstein Company, the film’s U.S. distributor, to reconsider the R rating. In a statement, Joan Graves, head of the ratings board, defended the rating, saying the film includes epithets that are hurled at a 13-year-old bullying victim. Graves said such ratings help guide parents “who want to be informed about content in movies, including language.” She said it’s up to parents to make the decision about what their children see “and not ours to make for them.”

Butler objected to the effect that such a rating could have on viewership: “I can’t believe the MPAA is blocking millions of teenagers from seeing a movie that could change — and in some cases, save — their lives.”

The film’s website says 3 million kids are bullied each month, and that 13 million kids are absent from school every year because of bullying.

An R rating prohibits anyone under the age of 17 from attending a film without a parent or adult guardian’s permission. According to the MPAA website, R-rated films “may include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements.” A PG-13 rating cautions parents that a film may contain material inappropriate for children under 13.

Butler previously has used social media to marshal public opinion and move policy. Last year, she collected more than 50,000 signatures through another petition on Change.org, in which she urged Michigan lawmakers to stop the state’s “License to Bully,” bill because it contained religious and moral exemptions from penalties for bullying. The legislature passed a modified bill that removed those exemptions.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/w_ParentingResource/bully-documentary-teen-campaigns-film-pg-13-rating/story?id=15820191

Enlarge Silverdocs

The Bully Project follows stories of several kids who are being bullied or have been bullied.

Silverdocs

The Bully Project follows stories of several kids who are being bullied or have been bullied.

Director Lee Hirsch started filming The Bully Project in 2009, about a year before bullying fully came of age as a high-profile crisis with the launch of what became the It Gets Better project. (That’s not to say that’s when bullying started, obviously — it’s when the current wave of popular media coverage swelled after several awful stories of suicides by bullied kids.)

What The Bully Project adds to the public conversation is an unflinching look at the stakes. At its center is the family of Tyler Long, a 17-year-old who had just recently hanged himself in a closet when filming started. It follows his anguished parents as they launch a community discussion of bullying in the wake of his death that it certainly appears the school doesn’t want to have (they organize a town hall meeting, and plenty of kids and parents show up, but nobody from the school or the district).

The film also follows Alex, a 14-year-old who can be funny and comfortable at home, but who has been so relentlessly brutalized at school (his special zone of torment seems to be the bus) that he walks around looking shell-shocked and a bit lost, which seems to isolate him even more.

There are other kids in the story: Kelby, a young lesbian from Oklahoma whose father explains that after she came out, people he’d known for years started refusing to acknowledge him on the street; Ja’meya, a 14-year-old whose very difficult path represents the dangers of and to bullied kids who get fed up and decide to fight back; and Ty Field-Smalley, whose suicide at 11 years old — 11 years old — drives his father, too, into activism.

At times, The Bully Project is a pretty grueling experience, but it probably wouldn’t be fair if it weren’t. And it isn’t only the bullying that’s frustrating: We see Alex’s parents try to take their concerns (which are amplified after the filmmakers conclude that they’re obligated to tell them what’s happening on the bus) to the school. There, they have a bizarre meeting with an administrator who gives them precisely the pacifying “we’ll take care of it” speech that many of the parents in the film say they hear all the time right before nothing happens.

Unfortunately, by that point in the film, we’ve already seen that same administrator intervene in what certainly smells like a bullying situation by forcing the two boys involved to shake hands and later telling the one who’s complaining of being bullied that if he doesn’t shake hands and make up and really mean it, he’s just as bad as the bully. (She really says this. It’s almost surreal.)

It gives you a sense of what these families feel like they’re up against, although in fairness, the schools are up against quite a lot themselves. There’s a point where a local official tells the Longs that it’s extraordinarily difficult for the school to single-handedly stop destructive behaviors by a kid whose parents are reinforcing those behaviors at home. To the Longs, it feels (very understandably) like blame-shifting and refusing to do anything, but I felt some sympathy for the school, too, because … it’s probably true.

There aren’t any suggestions of easy solutions in The Bully Project; it’s more about driving home the need for everybody to keep trying by just standing as a reminder of what’s at stake. Kelby’s father says at one point that he never understood the expression “you never know what someone’s been through until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes” until he had a gay child. The Bully Project can’t let you walk a mile in any of these people’s shoes, not by a longshot. But it can let you look at those shoes up close, maybe try them on. It’s not fun, but it’s well worth doing.

Note: The film has an online home at TheBullyProject.com, where there are extensive links to resources for kids and parents dealing with bullying and to the “grassroots movement” the film is intended to spur.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/06/23/137362129/the-bully-project-finds-its-moment