Joan Ryan: Kids Fear the Taunts of Bullies

Everywhere Debra Chasnoff goes these days, people tell her long- buried secrets from middle school. Chasnoff always listens. She is a listener by nature. But she also knows there is no use interrupting. Once the telling begins, time and distance dissolve, and she can almost smell the crushed Fritos and musty gym shirts and strawberry lip gloss of the junior high hallway.

"One woman told me the girl who bullied her still shows up as a character in her dreams," Chasnoff said over salad at the Double Play, a few blocks from her Bryant Street studio.

"When you think back to junior high, you don’t think about your social studies class. You think about who pushed you against the lockers, or what someone said to you on the bus."

Chasnoff is an Academy-Award-winning filmmaker whose stature allows her to make documentaries about anything she chooses. For the past decade, she has chosen to make films about and for kids, addressing head-on controversial topics such as gay and lesbian stereotypes. Her latest film takes viewers into real middle schools to hear kids talk about the name-calling and bullying that goes on every day.

The documentary, "Let’s Get Real," premiered Tuesday night at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco to a packed house. San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley school districts have committed to showing the film at their schools, and a slew of groups like the National Middle School Association and the National Association of School Psychologists have invited Chasnoff to screen the film at their upcoming conventions.

"Everybody who watched the film seemed to remember not only what happened to them in junior high, but the name of the kid who did it," Chasnoff said. "It’s amazing the impact it has. It stays with you your whole life."

Authorities in Colorado this week released footage from a home video that shows the two Columbine High School killers taking target practice in the woods.

The two teenagers are chillingly giddy about the prospect of firing bullets into people’s brains instead of the bowling pins they used as targets.

It makes you hope that in the nearly five years since the Columbine killings, adults have become more attuned to the rage that builds inside kids who are relentlessly bullied and humiliated at school.

But, Chasnoff says, too many parents and educators still shrug off bullying as an inevitable part of adolescence, even a rite of passage. Maybe they don’t know that 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because they fear being bullied, according to the National Education Association. Or that bullying has been linked to 75 percent of school shooting incidents, a U.S. Secret Service report says.

That’s why Chasnoff chose bullying for her new film, though she knows much has been written and produced on the topic since the Columbine shootings. What sets Chasnoff’s film apart is the students’ voices. She lets them tell their stories straight to the camera. They are impossible to ignore.

A boy named Brian says in the film he was called a fag about 50 times the first week of school. It happened all day in every class, relentlessly.

"All this stuff is going on, and I can’t pay attention (in class)," he says. "I write ’I hate the person’ over and over. I just want to ditch school or kill myself, anything to get out of it."

Chasnoff’s camera captures the gawky insecurity that defines early adolescence. In the hallways, girls hug their notebooks to their chests and boys amble in such a stiff, self-conscious way you think someone with a joystick is operating their limbs from a remote location. They want nothing more than to get through the day without embarrassment, an often elusive goal.

"If someone says something wrong in class, we, like, totally humiliate them," one boy admits, smiling. "We put the spotlight on them."

Any difference whatsoever is seized upon. It can be ethnicity, skin shade (too black, not black enough), shoes, religion, weight, learning style, speech pattern -- anything. Kids in middle school, like many adults, fear difference. Perhaps it is born of their own fear of being ostracized and condemned by the group. By ostracizing and condemning others, one’s own place feels more secure.

If we need any more evidence that bullying has tragic consequences, we got it from a story out of Connecticut last January. A 12-year-old boy hanged himself with a tie in his closet. He was an eccentric seventh-grader who was tormented by classmates who pushed him off the bleachers, shoved him down a stairwell and spit on him. The boy stopped going to school, and his mother, who worked 60 hours a week, refused to send him until she had assurances he would be safe.

Instead of investigating why the school did little to protect the boy, prosecutors put the mother on trial. Earlier this month a jury convicted her of contributing to her son’s death by keeping an unsafe and unhealthy home. Nevertheless, the boy’s suicide prompted Connecticut to pass a law requiring school staff to report cases of bullying.

"There’s so much pressure on teachers around testing and academics that they don’t have enough time to pay attention to what’s happening in halls and playgrounds," Henry Der, former deputy superintendent of public instruction for the California Department of Education, told the audience at the film’s premiere Tuesday.

Chasnoff, who has two school-age sons, says she wasn’t surprised by the stories she heard from kids while making the film, only by the number of them. Students were lined up at every school wanting to tell their stories. Some of those who appear in the documentary saw it for the first time at its premiere this week. One particularly tormented boy, who was actually pushed off his bike while the crew was filming him, was beaming when the lights in the theater came up.

"I’m so glad you did this," he told Chasnoff. "I hope you get this into every school in America."

He seemed to think that if kids and teachers truly understood the deep and lasting pain that bullying caused, maybe most of it would stop. I want to believe he’s right.