Education Matters:

Back when I was just a little shaver, I remember walking home from school and encountering our neighborhood bully on more than a few occasions. He would wait at a certain corner just to pick a fight with me or one of my buddies.

None of us were tough enough to challenge this kid, so we just went along with his pushing and shoving and general meanness. But each of us fantasized about one day hauling off and whacking him a good one and ending his reign of terror.

It was during this time in my life that my father insisted on his sons having boxing lessons to learn how to defend themselves. Our teacher, Joe Salas, was an Olympic silver medalist (1924) who exchanged his knowledge of boxing for legal fees owed to my father. Once a week for a couple of years, the Kimber brothers learned the art of self defense from a master.

My memories of this weekly lesson are not pleasant ones. Being the youngest of five boys, I was always on the losing end of any encounter that involved boxing gloves. But Joe could teach me how to dispatch the neighborhood bully, and that possibility made the weekly pummeling from my brothers worth it.

I’ll let you know how this turned out for me at the end of this column, but there’s another kind of bullying I’d like to address here that is by far more widespread and definitely more harmful. It involves:

?Nasty instant-messaging sessions

?Threatening e-mails

?Repeated text messages sent to a cell phone

?A website set up to mock others

?“Borrowing” someone’s screen name and pretending to be them while posting a message

?Forwarding supposedly private messages, pictures or video to others

With teen social lives moving to cyberspace, their private disagreements, grudges and intimidation often get reproduced, publicized and documented for all to see.

With the notoriety of recent incidents that have involved children committing suicide after being on the receiving end of mean-spirited Internet messages have schools, the police and courts are trying to figure out how to control this without infringing on anyone’s free speech rights. It is a rapidly evolving area of law with few guidelines or precedents.

Because of highly publicized school incidents, we now know that ignoring bullying can lead to violence or make a victim feel so overwhelmed that he or she sees suicide as the only way out.