Tennessee Mother Says Special Needs Daughter Was ‘Beaten and Whipped’ By Classmates After Years of Bullying
I’ve seen other news stories like this over the past 25 years. A kid gets bullied regularly, the school doesn’t intervene, and in some cases, the target commits suicide later.
In one story I read several years ago, the victim kid got so fed up with being bullied by the same kid after years and years (the school knew and did nothing), that one day, the small, victim kid “snapped,” tripped the big, fat bully boy…
As a result, the big, fat bully kid fell backwards, his neck hit the edge of a bench, his neck snapped, and he ended up paralyzed (or did the fat kid die? I cannot recall. He either died or was paralyzed).
I was bullied often as a kid at different public schools I went to (my family moved around a lot, from state to state, due to my father’s career).
I was a very shy kid, and my mother and the Baptist churches I was raised in never permitted me to be assertive and defend myself – according to the Baptists and my Mom, I was always supposed to be very passive. I was taught that confronting bullies and obnoxious or rude people was off-limits and wrong, no matter how politely I went about it.
As I went through life, that “be passive” (be codependent) stance did not serve me well.
It left me vulnerable to attracting more bullies, narcissists, jerks, selfish people, emotionally wounded people, needy people, and weird people, when out in public, on jobs I held, and in friendships and guys I dated.
I since learned, through life experience and a lot of research, that if you want to lessen your chances of attracting a jerk in the first place, or want to quickly eradicate a jerk from your life if you find one in your life, that ridding yourself of codependency and developing assertiveness and boundaries is vital.
I also learned that in all contexts – that is, in school as a kid, in jobs as an adult, dating at any age – that people will usually side with the bully (the abuser) over the target of the abuse.
I read books about the topics of abuse and bullying by therapists and psychologists, and they all explain that victims of abuse are usually victim-blamed.
Human Resources Departments, churches, and schools will NOT defend a victim of abuse – they will always side with the bully.
I also learned, via reading many articles about child- on- child bullying in schools that most teachers will not intervene to protect the victims (this was also my personal experience as a bullied kid in schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Even when I would explicitly ask the teachers to help me, to protect me from a bully, they would flatly refuse and tell me to sit down, shut up, and that it was not their problem. I’ve found from reading up on the topic of bulling in schools that this attitude among teachers still persists to this day.)
Also consider what happened during the “Me Too” trend a few years ago – rather than express horror at how rampant sexual harassment and abuse of women by men is, how normalized it was, and rather than formulating ways to combat it, most people chose to clutch their pearls in worry over how “Me Too” might hurt men as a group.
The concern should’ve been in protecting women victims and women targets of male harassment and abuse (which is common place and part of American culture and many other cultures world over, including Christian gender complementarian churches), but no, the concern was oddly re-directed by idiots who are wrongly, hyper- concerned about “due process” and protecting the reputations of men.
Schools will not protect victims of abuse.
If you’re a parent, even though most schools have a “suspend both kids in a fight, regardless of who was the instigator and who was the victim,” you need to be teaching your children from a young age that if they are picked on by another student, that their feelings matter (it’s not okay for other kids to hurt their feelings), and it’s okay for them to verbally and physically defend themselves – you have to be okay with your kid getting suspended, if he or she engages in self defense with a bully.
I can vouch for what the mother is saying below – what she says about how the school didn’t act on her kid’s behalf , even though she constantly asked them for help, was also my experience being bullied in public schools in the ’70s and ’80s, and I attended schools in different parts of the country, because my family moved every two to three years – schools will not lift a finger to help a kid, not even if the kid is being repeatedly bullied year round in classrooms, the bus, lunch room, in-between classes in hallways, and gym class.
Tennessee mother says special needs daughter was ‘beaten and whipped’ by classmates after years of bullying
Snippets:
The woman, Chrystal Finney, is suing the Giles County Board of Education and its director, alleging negligence.
August 25, 2022
By Minyvonne Burke
A Tennessee woman alleges her special needs daughter was “beaten and whipped” by classmates last August after years of bullying that she said was ignored by school administrators.
The woman, Chrystal Finney, is suing the Giles County Board of Education and its director, Vickie Beard, alleging negligence. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee on Aug. 11, nearly a year after the attack.
The suit alleges that Finney’s daughter, identified as JF in the document, was harassed and bullied for years while she attended the Giles County School System. The girl has autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome and other disabilities, according to the lawsuit.
As a form of treatment, she uses horse therapy. When the girl would become overwhelmed, she would sometimes act “like a horse by running and making certain sounds a horse may make,” the lawsuit states.
The suit alleges numerous instances of bullying dating to 2013. In one incident, classmates pushed the girl into a bathroom, turned the lights off, called her names, laughed at her and avoided her “to hurt her feelings,” the suit claims.
Another allegation is that a teacher “ignored JF’s condition and intimidated and bullied JF,” the lawsuit says, without providing further details. The suit also says a bus assistant approached the girl, “acted threatening to her” and “scared her.”
Finney sent numerous letters to administrators, but “the school took no meaningful action to prevent the further harassment and attacks,” according to the lawsuit.
It alleges that the bullying continued and that it escalated on Aug. 13, 2021, when, it says, Finney’s daughter was assaulted in an outside area at Richland High School.
“While in the designated area, a student obtained a stick from a nearby tree and struck JF in the head and body while pretending he was taming a horse — a clear reference to JF’s actions affiliated with her horse therapy,” the suit says.
“Thereafter, a gang of approximately six other students surrounded JF, joined in on the beating, and began to strike JF with sticks. This activity drew the attention of other students, including students from other grade levels, and this resulted in a mass of students that encircled JF in such a manner as to render her unable to retreat and forced to endure a physical beating by her peers.”
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