Everyone’s responsibility

Saturday, March 12, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama kicked off a campaign against bullying this week with a video on Facebook and a conference at the White House.

Thursday’s conference brought students, parents, teachers, administrators and federal officials together to find ways to combat bullying both at school and online. The push by the Obamas will put a welcome spotlight on this important issue.

There has been a steady stream of troubling news over the past few years about children being bullied and how the system has often failed them. For example:

• In an incident caught on video and posted on the Internet, a Mississippi teenager walked up to a special needs student in a high school gym and hit him in the head with a vicious blow. School officials suspended the assailant. It took the persistent intervention of the victim’s parents for school policy to change.

• An 11-year-old boy in Oklahoma shot and killed himself after being suspended for retaliating to a bully’s attack. The boy had gotten in trouble for retaliating before, and the boy’s parents said he had been bullied for two years, but school officials said they had no record of it. School officials should know that most bullying goes unreported.

• A high school senior in Ohio hanged herself after being harassed for months through cyberbullying. After breaking up with her boyfriend, the girl was subject to repeated harassment. In retaliation, the boyfriend forwarded nude pictures of her she had taken and sent to his cell phone. The photos were spread throughout two high schools and the community. The girl went to school officials and a school police officer but was told there was little they could do because she was 18. The case has spurred an effort to change state law.

Obama said that more than a third of all middle and high school students say they’ve been bullied in the past year, and more than 3 million students have said they were pushed, hit, kicked or spit on. He said that because bullying has always been around, “sometimes we’ve turned a blind eye to the problem.”

“We’ve said, ‘Kids will be kids,’ ” Obama said. “And so sometimes we overlook the real damage that bullying can do, especially when young people face harassment day after day, week after week.”

He noted that bullying can result in poor attendance and performance, and he also referenced some of the more tragic cases. Bullying is no longer confined to schools. The Internet and the prevalence of smart phones have turned schoolyard taunts into constant harassment.

Several states, including Nevada, have passed laws to address school and electronic bullying. Facebook announced it would roll out a new safety page addressing bullying and said it will allow people to anonymously report bullying to the site, as well as to people — parents and teachers, for instance — in their networks. Those are good steps, but it takes more than laws and increased Internet protection.

Parents, students and schools have to be aware of what’s going on and then do something to stop bullying. The president called on people to take responsibility, referring to the tragic situations in which children have felt like they had no place to turn and took their lives.

“We also have to make sure we’re doing everything we can so that no child is in that position in the first place,” he said. “And this is a responsibility we all share — a responsibility we have to teach all children the Golden Rule: We should treat others the way we want to be treated.”

Indeed. People can’t shrug their shoulders anymore and let bullying continue. The consequences have been tragic.