Rage/Bullying
Warm-up Fuzzy

For as long as anyone can remember, John Mason has been the neighborhood bully. As a child, he teased his brothers and sisters until they cried, threatened smaller children so they would give up their lunch money and started fights with other boys for no apparent reason. He just seemed to enjoy hurting people.

John is now eleven years old and his pattern of violence has become more serious. He was suspended twice this fall for assaulting other students at Jefferson Middle School in Charlottesville, and police arrested him in December for dropping rocks onto children from the roof of an elementary school. The juvenile court judge who heard the case sentenced John to one month at the Center for Violent Children, where he received psychological counselling and daily doses of an experimental drug to reduce aggression. His parent’s hoped that the treatment would bring about a change in John’s behavior, but on his first day back from the center he pushed his eight-year-old sister off the front porch.

The Virginia legislature passed tough new laws in the early years of the twenty-first century that gave the courts broad power to deal with youthful criminals. So far this year (2012) state courts have sentenced forty-one children under the age of 16 to prison for ten years or longer, and one 14-year-old, convicted of murder, was given life.

John’s parents live in hourly dread, fearing the news of another act of violence — an anxiety shared by neighbors, teachers and other children. An eleven year old bully has terrorized a community. Use your problem solving skills to explore challenges presented by this personal, family, and societal crisis. Work your way through the process until your team has created an action plan to deal with one of the situation’s major