boy, 12, kills himself after 'he was bullied

[Posteritatis]

14. Are we seeing an uptick, or are we just seeing more of what's always been happening?

Twenty years ago, kids who were driven to suicide by their peer would be local news, maybe state/provincial news, with an unhealthy dollop of discomfort talking about things like that serving to minimize a lot of the coverage that did result, push the responsibility on the kid rather than the cause, and so on.

I was the community target as a kid, but was lucky; my folks moved to a larger city, giving me a clean slate and (with some initial difficulty) a rebooted and healthy social life. I don't know if I would have gone the route this kid did if they hadn't moved, but if I'm honest with myself I could see myself possibly going down that road a few years later. If that had happened, it would've been in the mid-nineties; it probably wouldn't get noticed in the city I'm in now, four hours' drive from that town, and I'm utterly certain nobody reading this thread would have ever heard about it.

There's a hell of a long way to go regarding bullying of course, but I do think the attitude in general is getting healthier - that it's out there, that it's terrible, that it's to be acknowledged and talked about and thought about. As with a lot of social problems, once people are willing to start seriously looking and thinking about something, it can be very easy to be utterly astonished at what we'd been missing all along.