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JERREY ROBERTS

The area high school students who joined the Gazette's focus group on bullying included, from left, Aidan Holloway-Bidwell, Northampton High School; Keanu Burke, Northampton High School; Dylan Kaufman, Northampton High School; Sean Finch, Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School; Gracie Davidson, Hampshire Regional High School; Betty Czitrom, South Hadley High School; Ashlie Garcia, Hampshire Regional High School; Naimah Petigny, Amherst Regional High School; and Jessica Connor, Easthampton High School.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, in the first of a two-part series, we report on how young people in area high schools view the problem of bullying. Coming Monday: their sense of how this problem can be solved.

NORTHAMPTON - What started as a joke soon got out of hand.

As is common with BFFs, Easthampton student Jessica Connor spent a lot of time with her best friend. Soon other students were taunting them about their close relationship. She was called a lesbian on a weekly, then daily, basis. Then it was multiple times every school day, in the lunchroom, outside school, and in the classroom, for months.

When she was teased, everyone would laugh, she said. Sometimes a teacher would tell the bullies to "knock it off."

"It was just a stupid joke between the guys. I thought it was funny at first," Connor said. "It just felt like teasing - Oh, ha, ha. And then after a while, it got to the point that I didn't want to be around my friends because I didn't want to be called names."

Connor's experience is hardly unique.

Hampshire Regional High School freshman Gracie Davidson said she was ridiculed for her weight and appearance. South Hadley High School sophomore Betty Czitrom, new to the district, faced taunts by girls calling her a "poser" and a "fake."

These accounts are among many similar ones revealed Wednesday in a focus group on bullying convened by the Daily Hampshire Gazette. It was attended by nine area high school students from Northampton, Easthampton, South Hadley, Hampshire Regional, Amherst Regional and Smith Vocational and Agricultural high schools.

Of the nine students, six said they themselves have been subjected to bullying behavior, and three said they had not. All nine said they had witnessed other students being bullied before, after and during school, in classrooms, halls, sports fields, school functions, online, at summer camps and in their own homes. The form bullying takes, they said, varies: name-calling, passing mean notes, exclusion, physical threats, harassing phone calls and online taunting.

Three participants said they had themselves bullied other students - actions they later came to reflect on, and regret.

A sense that these teens, who had witnessed or been bullies, had been let down by the public school system was overwhelming.

"I feel like teachers will wait until something big happens," said Ashlie Garcia, an eighth-grader at Hampshire Regional. "If you go to a teacher and say something, they'll like say they'll talk to that person, but they just keep on doing it. They won't stop the problem if it's little. They won't do something until it gets big."

The subject of teen bullying has come under intense scrutiny in the aftermath of the Jan. 14 suicide of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old South Hadley student who officials say endured months of merciless bullying.

This week, the Northwestern District Attorney's Office brought criminal charges against six teenagers prosecutors say harassed and in some cases stalked Prince. Meanwhile, state lawmakers are working on anti-bullying legislation that would mandate school officials to report instances of bullying to police.

Today and Monday, the Gazette offers reports on the problem of teenage bullying in 2010, as seen by students themselves. (Follow this link for an explanation on how the Gazette pulled this group together.)

Lessons learned

Students and teachers at Amherst Regional High School spent time in school discussing bullying and its causes after Prince committed suicide and also last year when Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old Springfield boy, hanged himself after he had been bullied.

After Prince died, Naimah Petigny, an Amherst Regional High School senior, said students wore green and held a roundtable discussion at lunchtime about bullying. Marking such a tragedy seemed appropriate.

"It can be so hurtful to see something that caused someone to commit suicide not taken seriously," Petigny said.

Students said that in their experience, adults rarely step in to intercede when bullying occurs, and some felt that adults were intimidated by the bullies.

In the case of Connor, bullying stopped after she talked to her friend; together they spoke with a guidance counselor. The counselor pulled the ringleader of the teasing into her office for a discussion. When he wrote Connor a letter asking her not to tell anyone about what had happened, Connor agreed to "drop the whole thing" and the bullying stopped.

The students in the focus group said the old saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me," holds no weight in their world.

"Words probably hurt worse than anything else because it's someone's opinion on you," said Connor, an EHS freshman. "The most important thing in society today is probably people's judgment of one another."

Connor said she waited months to say anything about the bullying because she didn't want to appear weak, which she feared would fuel more harassment.

"I learned from past experiences that when you show you're vulnerable or weak, they just come after you more," Connor said.

Students said bullying is especially intense in middle school, and tends to recede in high school, perhaps because students are more mature, or have academic pressures to focus on.

But there are conflicts, sometimes intense ones. Petigny said there have been four or five major fights at her high school this year. Most of them were between girls, she said.

"Usually something starts as an emotional problem," Petigny said. "People just watch and they wait for the school to come and pull kids apart."

The gender gap

Students agreed that there is a difference between the way girls and boys bully. Girls, they said, are more "vicious" bullies than boys. Girls tend to drag out a disagreement, students said, spread rumors and talk behind people's backs instead of confronting the problem. They also seek to gather allies in their harassment.

"They gang up on each other hard-core - it's pretty ridiculous," said Keanu Burke, a Northampton High School senior. "If two girls are in a dispute, it doesn't stay between them. They have to see how many I can rally to my side, and you have to be on my side. It's pretty ridiculous. Then it moves on from whatever the original problem was. It gets blown up."

Boys tend to have a single confrontation, said Dylan Kaufman, another Northampton High School senior. The argument is usually over who is the stronger boy, he said. Girls, on the other hand, will bully each other over looks, popularity and attention from boys.

"Guys are more like threats, like, 'I would kick your ass if we fought right now,'" Kaufman said. "Girls are more, like, emotional."

Kaufman said he has seen a group of girls spend their entire lunch period riffing on how ugly another girl looked in a picture.

And as teenagers have come to have an entire social world online, cyberbullying has become yet another way to inflict hurt. It involves hateful words posted in online forums such as Facebook and hurtful instant messages.

Students discussed at least two incidents in which Facebook groups were created to harass boys at South Hadley and Amherst Regional high schools. The groups had mean titles that gave the first and last name of a student followed by a negative description. Once formed, people are invited to join the group, and post comments against the person online.

At Amherst Regional High School, Petigny said the Facebook group was quickly shut down by the principal. She said during the school day he made an announcement over the loudspeaker that if the site wasn't closed and the harassment stopped, all group members would be punished. The site was closed.

In South Hadley, Czitrom said a group was started against another student after Prince's suicide. The group was started to slander a freshman boy, calling him gay.

"It happens all the time," Czitrom said. "After everything with Phoebe, it's still happening."

Why they bully

Students clearly have thought about why bullying occurs.

"They want to be normal. Everyone wants to be normal," said Aidan Holloway-Bidwell, a Northampton High School sophomore, speaking of bullies. "If no one is different then there's no normal, then there's no standard if they don't make a distinction."

Czitrom said boys and girls can get sucked in to bullying students in an effort to be accepted and gain popularity.

"You want to be on the side who has the power," she said.

Burke said he has wondered how many of the teens facing charges in the Prince case were just going along with bullying Prince in an attempt to be accepted or liked.

"How many of those kids were ... not the ringleader, and went along with it and got carried away. How many of those kids were bullied in their younger years and now they're finally getting what it feels like to be the top dog? Because someone chose them to be their friends and that person happens to be one of the popular boys," Burke mused.

"They forgot to think about this girl's feelings so they could achieve higher social status," he said. "They forgot to have a conscience."

The desire for higher social status is a major force in bullying, said Burke, who compared bullying to steroids, in that a little harassment can give someone's popularity an artificial boost.

"It feels good to be well-liked and on top, and bullying is a quick, easy fix," he said. "I feel like the most liked people at my school and any of my social situations are not anyone who uses bullying as a tool to get there."

Anyone could be a victim of bullying, the students said. Bullies seem to target people at random, but do tend to focus their criticism on aspects of a person that are outside the high school norm.

"There's one middle area and on either side is the extreme and that's what they target," Kaufman said. "They talk about looks and appearances - you're too fat or too skinny, whether you dress too sexy or not enough. There is one norm, and if you're on either end, that's what people go after."

Connor said social status isn't always the reason behind bullying. She said she engaged in bullying behavior in the past to make herself feel better after she was picked on. She regrets it now. "It's a chain reaction," she said. "I would go off and bug someone else because I felt low and I wanted to feel bigger than someone else."

Davidson voiced similar reasons for behavior she now regrets. "It was never like, wow maybe I'm hurting their feelings. It didn't occur to me," Davidson said.

Czitrom said in the past she has gone along with bullying to avoid arguments with her friends.

"I just went along. I wanted my friends to like me," she said. "I just thought it didn't mean anything."

But Czitrom said she won't be doing that, especially now that she has been on the receiving end, and knows well how much it hurts.

When she was targeted by four girls who called her a poser and a fake - calling her at home and harassing her at school - it took a toll on her self-esteem. "It was shocking to see this happen to me," she said. "It went on for a good while," Czitrom said. "I just contracted inward. I became very self-conscious and just aware of every little thing about me."

She found relief when she told a guidance counselor about the bullying, and regretted not doing so sooner.

"There's this fear of showing your weakness and that you're not liked by someone. No one wants people to know they aren't liked."

Czitrom said at her high school, bullying is seen as a rite of passage. But all teens said the perception that bullying is an inevitable part of growing up needs to change.

"Teachers can't be afraid to use their position of power to intervene," Czitrom said. "How many times is it going to be ignored? How many times are they just going to let it happen until someone commits suicide?"

Coming Monday: How members of the Gazette focus group feel bullying can be stopped.