Chapter 6: Social Context of Schools

I created a brochure that I will use as a tool when teaching my students about bullying and hate crimes.

Here it is:

When Hate Spreads

By Shila Cook


When you bully, physically harm a person, make fun of a group of people, or threaten a person you are committing a hate crime of some kind. Bullying is defined as “The act of intimidating a weaker person to make them do something,” whereas Hate Crime is defined as “a crime that occurs when you target a victim because of their perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation.” The only difference is that a hate crime occurs because the person is a certain way, dresses a different way, is gay, is a female, is Mexican.
The following are example of specific types of bullying:

Sexuality Based Bullying:

An example of this is the Matthew Shepard story. Matthew was a gay man and in October 1998 he was murdered by two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Matthew was tied to a fence where he was then beaten and left to die. He was found eight-teen hours later by a cyclist who thought he was a scarecrow at first. Matthew died four days after his attack.

~For more information about the Matthew Shepard story you can visit

www.matthewshepard.org

Racial Bullying:

An example of this is the James Byrd Jr. story. James was a forty-nine year old black man that was murdered in 1998 by two white men who are now waiting on death row. These two men, one of which was a Lawrence R. Baker, tied James to a pickup truck and dragging him behind it until he died. As if that was not enough in 2004 hate crimes continued for James Bryd Jr. Someone had scratched racial slurs into his headstone, which was then overturned.

~For more on James Boyd Jr.’s story please visit

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/b/james_jr_byrd/index.html

Religious Bullying:

An example of this was the recent genocide of the Jewish population during the era of Nazi Germany that spanned from 1933 to 1945. During this time there were mass killings of Jews in work camps (concentration camps), gas chambers, execution style, and from ill treatment. There were about 5.6 million Jewish casualties during this span of twelve years.