Northern Virginia lawmakers have introduced legislation that would make bullying a criminal offense and require Virginia schools to separate the perpetrator from the victim. Del. Adam Ebbin, D-Arlington/Alexandria, is proposing to elevate extreme cases of bullying to a class-one misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison and up to a $2,500 fine and enable victims to sue their harassers. In conjunction, Del. David Englin, D-Arlington/Fairfax, introduced the Anti-Bullying Responsibility Act that would make bullying prevention a mandatory part of teacher training, require all incidents to be reported to the district superintendent, and force schools to create procedures to separate bullies and their victims.
Englin was moved to include the last measure by a Fairfax County case in which a group of boys repeatedly sent sexually threatening text messages to a female fifth-grade classmate at Sunrise Valley Elementary School in Reston.
“And when she went to school, she was made to sit in the same classrooms as these boys,” Englin said. “Because it happened off school grounds, the administrators said there was nothing they could do.”
More than half of Fairfax public school students said they had been bullied in the last year in a 2009 survey of eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders by the school system and local government.
“Bullying transcends poverty, and it transcends socioeconomics,” Englin said. “Even in the best schools, bullying happens.”
Ebbin’s bill focuses on the punishment side; he said he was aghast to discover there was no state law against bullying after the Yorktown sheriff’s office refused to investigate a bullying victim’s suicide as a crime.
“The bulliers had said beforehand, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and get it over with and kill yourself?’ ” Ebbin said. “It’s troubling that it could happen in this state.”
In addition to criminalizing serious acts of bullying — whose shades of gray individual school systems would define — Ebbin’s bill would require any physical injury resulting from bullying to be reported to the commonwealth’s attorney. Both his and Englin’s proposals would create unprecedented databases of bullying incidents and trends.
“Are there particular schools where this is a problem? And why is it a problem in some schools, and not others?” Englin said. “There’s an anecdotal sense that this is a serious problem and perhaps even a growing problem, but if we’re not actually reporting and collecting data, it’s hard to know.”
