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Saturday, April 11, 2009

An 11 year old hangs himself over antigay bullying at school


HE WAS 11 for God's sake! 
Have your ever hear your child say someone was gay as a joke?

"An 11-year-old Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hung himself Monday after enduring bullying at school, including daily taunts of being gay, despite his mother's weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. This is at least the fourth suicide of a middle-school aged child linked to bullying this year. Carl, a junior at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield who did not identify as gay, would have turned 12 on April 17, the same day hundreds of thousands of students will participate in the 13th annual National Day of Silence by taking some form of a vow of silence to bring attention to anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) bullying and harassment at school. The other three known cases of suicide among middle-school students took place in Chatham, Evanston and Chicago, Ill., in the month of February."

3 comments:

revkjarla said...

sigh. there are no words....

Dr. Laura Marie Grimes said...

Thank you for posting this. It made a big impression on my twelve year old son, especially the video....He went from saying "that's a lot of um's" to "that's a good kid."

Liz McGowen said...

What a beautiful child, and what a great tragedy. Thank you for posting about this. We all need to be aware, and to look for ways to end bullying in schools. As a parent living just a few blocks from the school where the child in Evanston, IL, died, and as a counselor working with parents, it's my belief that this is an issue we can't examine too closely.