Justice for bullied bus monitor?

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

The concept of justice is a tricky one to grasp in this age of innumerable platforms for user-generated content on the internet. I’ve watched in fascination at the many responses that have been spawned by the ‘Bullied Bus Monitor’ story that’s been developing over the past few weeks, each with their own interpretation of justice.

The gist of the story is: Karen Klein, a 68 year old school bus monitor from New York State was verbally bullied by four teenage boys, who filmed it on a cell phone and posted it online. The 10 minute film went viral, with the clip on YouTube receiving millions of hits in a matter of days.

The boys have been excluded from their school for a year, banned from school buses for the same period, and ‘sentenced’ to fifty hours community service with the elderly. For the next year, the boys will have to enter alternative education programmes.

The story has created polarised responses. A Canadian man, himself a victim of bullying as a child, saw the video on YouTube and set up an online campaign, aiming to raise $5000 to send Klein ‘on the vacation of a lifetime’. The running total is now at $670,000 ($836,000 NZ). Corporations are getting in on the game, falling over themselves to offer Klein free flights and holidays.

The other responses have been less altruistic. The boys’ actions have created a huge backlash. One boy reportedly received 1000 threatening text messages in one night. Strangers have been sending abusive messages to them online and, according to the father of one of the boys, his family has been receiving death threats.

And here we return to our question of justice.

Can money really help, when you’ve been hurt and humiliated so publicly? Can such misery be eased by having the Walt Disney corporation offer you a free holiday? Can sending a death threat to the children and their families make it better, in a grotesquely modern version of ‘eye for an eye’ retribution? Commenting on the harassment of the boys, Klein herself said, “That’s not the way to go about things. They’re just kids.”

Klein received letters of apology from each of the boys, and initially refused to accept them. The cynical part of me wonders whether the boys regret their actions because of the public outcry, or because they genuinely understand that what they did was demeaning, nasty and dehumanising? Would they have come to that conclusion themselves, if the film had not gone viral?

Nobody seems to have suggested a restorative justice model of reconciliation – for them all to sit around a table and talk about it, giving Klein space to express the impact on her life and for those boys to sit face to face with her and apologise.

I am sure that the lives of the protagonists will never be the same again. While I abhor their actions, I have compassion for the way the boys have been ostracised and demonised. This incident will follow them for years. Sadly, this sort of bullying happens every day, and the actions of these boys are not unusual. It leads us to the big question of how this sort of bullying became such a normalised part of teenage life, and what can be done to tackle it? While there’s no easy answer, it’s good to know that excellent organisations on our own shores such as Netsafe are striving to do just that.

Anna Field is a youth worker based in Auckland. Originally from the UK, she has been in New Zealand since 2010.