WESTMINSTER — Conflict resolution does not work when addressing bullies, John Halligan asserts.
“Why?” he asked his audience in the auditorium of the Bellows Falls Union High School.
“Because the bully will say whatever [the mediator] wants to hear,” one student replied.
“Yes,” Halligan agreed. “The bully enjoys the power he is given in that situation and, essentially, is not being held accountable. And the victim knows it will probably get worse once they walk out of the office.”
The father of 13-year-old Ryan Halligan, who hanged himself in 2003 after what was discovered to be years of bullying from the same classmate, drove home a point to the students.
“I want you to remember one thing,” he said. “You are all loved, no matter what kind of situation you come from at home. You are all precious to someone.”
Halligan said that bullying does not just affect the child who is bullied.
“There is a whole network of family and friends behind that child who live with the effects of bullying,” he reminded them.
“My wife and I, Ryan's sister and younger brother - we all live with how Ryan chose to deal with bullying, the hole he left behind in our lives.”
Halligan said his daughter, Megan, who found Ryan, “is still devastated. We are doing all we can to help her and be there for her,” he said, “but she's having a tough time of it.”
He noted that the bully and bystanders also suffer as well.
Megan's struggles are the visible side of being a surviving family member of a person who commits suicide.
Looking at John Halligan's speaking schedule - he is on the road every school day in April and May telling Ryan's story - one can't help but wonder whether this is how a father is continuing to deal with his son's death eight years later.
“Yes,” he said simply.
From suicide to state law
The Halligan family's story is not unique, and a series of suicides of young people across the nation this fall have brought the problem of bullying to greater public awareness.
A study by Sameer Hinduja, Ph.D., and Justin W. Patchin, Ph.D., of the Cyberbullying Research Center, confirms that “youth who are bullied, or bully others, are at an elevated risk for suicidal thoughts, attempts, and completed suicides.
“The reality of these links has been strengthened through research showing how experience with peer harassment (most often as a target but also as a perpetrator) contributes to depression, decreased self-worth, hopelessness, and loneliness - all of which are precursors to suicidal thoughts and behavior,” the study says.
The young man who bullied Ryan did so at school. The bullying occurred before Act 117, An Act Relating to Bullying Prevention Policies, was introduced in response to Ryan's suicide and passed by Vermont lawmakers in 2004.
The act is known as “Ryan's Law,” in his memory.
Halligan's experience backtracking through his son's last years of life, a nonlinear journey that revealed the pattern of long-term bullying, led him to believe that Vermont's schools were poorly equipped to deal with the problem.
The bereaved father found no formal definitions of bullying, protocols to deal with it, or accountability for bullies, either legally or through school policy.
Furthermore, Halligan said, “There's no direct evidence [in most cases] of bullying, and schools dealt with it by having the kids apologize and shake hands,” he said.
These conflict-resolution protocols didn't work. “It didn't stop the bullying,” he said.
So Halligan approached his local representative, Peter Hunt, who had been Ryan's principal in elementary school, about sponsoring legislation that would strengthen existing harassment and hazing laws already in place.
Barely four months later, then-Governor Jim Douglas signed the law, with John and Kelly Halligan looking over his shoulder.
“I don't know of any other bill that has passed through the legislature so quickly,” Halligan said with a smile.
Because of Halligan's crusade, “after Ryan's suicide, people were taking bullying in schools seriously,” he said.
Since 2004, Ryan's Law has defined bullying and outlined protocols that educators must follow with regard to bullying on school property (see sidebar).
“We're governed by very strict guidelines and are mandated to make a report if we witness or hear about [incidents of bullying],” said BFUHS Spanish teacher Julie Torres, a member of the Windham Northeast School Supervisory Union diversity committee.
She also noted that “there are signs all over school demonstrating alternatives to using words harmfully.”
Torres pointed out a sign that suggests words to replace the phrase “that's so gay” - “ludicrous,” “eccentric,” “wacky,” “absurd,” and other alternatives.
But Torres noted that the school's jurisdiction stops when a student is off school grounds.
If an incident occurs off school property, “there's nothing we can do if we hear about it, other than alert parents,” she said.
It's beyond the school's authority to intercede in cases of cyberbullying, which has become a focus of attention since Ryan's death.
In Vermont, the state's Human Rights Commission notes, there are no laws on the books that either define cyberbullying or regulate it, unlike New Hampshire, which enacted legislation last summer.
A longstanding problem
As Halligan found out when confronting Ryan's bully, the denial of parents is often the biggest asset for the bully.
In the last year of his life, Ryan told his dad that he had finally made friends with the boy who had been mocking and bullying him since the fifth grade.
“Everything is fine,” he said.
But the “friendship” took an ugly turn that fall, when Ryan revealed something personal to his new “friend,” and the bully took the information and began spreading rumors around school that Ryan was gay.
After his son's death, Halligan also found e-mails from the previous summer between a popular girl at school named Ashley and Ryan, indicating they were “more than friends” - at least online - “perhaps to prove he wasn't gay.”
But when Ryan returned to school that fall, the girl and her friends laughed at him, saying that it was all a big joke and she was not interested in him.
With these revelations, Halligan said, he understood just what pressures Ryan was under when he died.
But Ryan kept all the information to himself, “probably because he was embarrassed,” Halligan said.
When his dad asked how things were going at school, Ryan would answer, “Fine, Dad.” And Halligan believed him, even though the truth was quite a bit different for Ryan.
Halligan had established what he considered online safety rules when he first gave his son his own computer.
One of these policies: a universal password that would let Halligan access all of Ryan's accounts.
After Ryan's death, Halligan used those passwords for the first time to focus his attention on his son's computer, his instant messages, and his e-mails. He gleaned anecdotal information from kids who knew Ryan, to try and understand what was going on before his son died.
Halligan knew it could not have happened in a void.
He understands well that “Ryan died from an illness he didn't get help for: depression.”
But that depression likely resulted from environmental pressures that accumulated over Ryan's fifth-, sixth-, and early seventh-grade experience, he said.
It was exacerbated, he said, by his son's “finding out the girl he had thought he was having a relationship with was playing with him and wasn't interested at all, and was laughing at him, along with her friends.”
Halligan said that “if at any time, one of [the girl's] friends had stood up and said, 'hey, that's not cool' to Ashley, Ryan might be alive today. If any one of the bully's friends, or anyone who heard the rumors he was spreading about Ryan, had stood up and said, 'Hey, stop that,' Ryan might be alive today.”
But, he pointed out, hindsight is 20/20.
Bystanders and bullies
The truth is that 85 percent of bystanders - people who see or hear bullying going on directly, whether in person or online - do nothing and empower the bully. If just one of those people indicated in any way that what was happening was not right, suicides could have been averted.
“Don't stand by and let this happen,” he urged the students.
According to one Canadian study, “More than one-half the time, bullying stops within ten seconds of a bystander stepping in to help.”
Halligan noted that recent research into the role of bystanders says even bystanders can end up being victims of the bully when they do not act to prevent the bullying they are witnessing.
“The guilt that they could have done something and didn't” is something they carry with them, “and it changes them until they can talk about it,” he said.
Teaching kids what to do when they witness bullying empowers everyone, Halligan said.
If parents discover a child is doing the bullying, “don't sweep it under the rug,” said Halligan, noting that the mother of Ryan's bully did just that.
“Talk to your child, and get them to admit their [behavior],” he said. “Explain that someone is feeling what that child says about them; that words don't cause bruises people can see - but are far more deadly.”
Confronting the bully
Halligan said that after Ryan's suicide, his experience with the bully's parents baffled him.
Even after he confronted the bully's parents, they apparently never did anything more about it. Months after Ryan's death, Halligan found out the bully was still spreading rumors around school that “Ryan was gay” and that was why he killed himself.
When one of Ryan's classmates e-mailed Halligan about the continued rumors, he became enraged and immediately returned to the bully's house.
Halligan said he was incensed but in control of himself and, in front of the parents, he confronted the boy. After initially denying it, in the face of Halligan's outrage and pain, the bully, with tears streaming down his face, eventually broke down and confessed, and finally said the words Halligan needed to hear.
“I needed to hear that he was sorry,” Halligan said. “It's important to hear that from a bully, to know that they understand what they did.”
Halligan said that one of the biggest reasons he tours the country speaking at schools is because he gets e-mails after each talk that tell him he's reached someone.
“I got an e-mail years later from a young lady who was in college,” he explained. “She told me that after hearing my talk [in high school], she went to the girl she had bullied while she was in middle school and apologized. She told me it changed her life, changed who she was, and she thanked me for helping her understand.
“That,” said Halligan, “is why I keep giving these talks about Ryan and what we found out after he died.”
“It's easy for people to say stuff online that they don't have to be responsible for,” said one BFUHS student whose parents did not want his name used. “You can hide behind your user ID and say anything. It happens all the time.”
“Even adults can be bullies,” Halligan said. “It's a human problem, not just a kid problem.”
Last year, Bob Thomson, of the Rockingham Selectboard, resigned after anonymous comments appeared in the online comments section of the Brattleboro Reformer, slandering his family and employees. He was a victim of cyberbullying.
The Reformer has since changed its online letter protocol and requires an identification process before online comments can be posted.
However, when confronted or exposed for their behavior and brought to account, bullies often will not back down, or refrain from bullying in the first place, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center study. It takes more to get bullies to change their behavior.
“Parents need to teach their children that words go inside a person's head and stay there until they get verbalized. Bruises go away. Words never do.”
Warning signs
That internalization of the bully's taunts is what caused Ryan's depression and ultimate suicide, Halligan asserted.
“If he could have talked to me about it,” Halligan said, Ryan would be celebrating his twenty-first birthday this year.
Halligan thought he had a good relationship with his son but, in hindsight, admits that he was not paying as much attention as he could have because of the travel required for his job at IBM.
“I should have taken it seriously when my wife told me on the phone that Ryan had come home that week, and put his head on the kitchen table, and didn't move,” he said.
“I thought he was just tired, and if something was wrong, he would have told me. But there was something going on. It's not normal for a 13-year-old to behave that way.”
Halligan's sense that he didn't do enough while Ryan was alive is playing out with each talk he gives at a school, in the hope he will reach one child and change one person's life.
Asked whether he still felt guilty, he nodded.
Asked whether part of why he does these talks is to work through the guilt, tears sprang to his eyes and, in a strangled voice, he replied, “Yes. I think so.”
Halligan speaks of forgiveness when he tells people about the bully and the young lady Ryan cared about.
Ashley came to his house, mortified to the point of staying home from school and becoming a suicide risk herself.
“I wanted to forgive them,” he said. And he did.
But has he forgiven himself yet?
“I'm working on it,” he said unsteadily, looking down and wiping his eyes, shaking his head. “I'm working on it.”