School Bullying Council

The bully gets a new perspective on life: upside down and heading for the concrete.

Casey Heynes, a 10th Grader in Sydney Australia, fought back against a schoolyard bully Monday and is now a world-wide hero for doing it.

A friend of the bully recorded a video of the confrontation to post on YouTube to humiliate Casey, but things didn’t turn out that way.  The video went viral, people from all over the world are applauding Casey for fighting back, the citizens of Sydney are divided over it and now the bully looks like the chump.

Sixteen-year old Casey says he “snapped” after constant bullying because of his weight.

“All I was doing was defending myself. I’ve never had so much support,” he said during an interview with A Current Affair.

The bully is a much smaller 7th Grader who felt confident that he could punch Casey in the face without having a fight on his hands.   He backed the much larger boy against the wall and started throwing punches.  Finally Casey had enough and picked him up and threw him down hard on the concrete.

He was asked if he was a superhero, he replied with a laugh, “No, but I wish I was.”

Both boys were suspended for four days in accordance with established school guidelines.

The people of Sydney may be divided over the affair, but the world is clearly not:  websites and Facebook fanpages like  Casey the Punisher or this YouTube tribute with music sprang up overnight hailing his action.

You be the judge:

http://aquapour.com/schoolyard-bully-video-goes-viral/556427/

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/

BOSTON — A viral video is sparking an intense worldwide debate about bullying. On Wednesday, a local expert gave her take on kids getting pushed too far.

The father of the teen who acted out told an Australian newspaper that his son is not violent and had been the target of bullying for years.

It stated with verbal taunts and then a punch in the face. At first the 16-year-old in an Australian school didn’t seem to budge, and then there was another jab from the smaller 12-year-old – then two others – and then a bully smackdown.

The YouTube video that’s gone viral shows the taunter limping away and leaving some online applauding the actions of the victim turned aggressor.

Leslie University professor Nancy Carlsson, who has written about kids and violence, says the video tells a lot more about the school than it does the students.

“It tells you there’s a whole school climate, that’s one of alienation and aloneness and separation,” said Carlsson.

Both boys wound up suspended from school for four days.

The school system was quoted as saying “it does not tolerate any violence, and that the only injury was a grazed knee.”

(Copyright (c) 2011 Sunbeam Television Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42122701