"Ben X" and Bullying

by Dora Raymaker · 2009-03-03 16:00:00 UTC
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a teenage boy sits in front of a row of school lockers, one of them open and a backpack and lunch bag litter the ground; he holds his head in his handsThe Belgian movie Ben X got a mixed review from from the Herald (WA). The main theme of the movie is school bullying of an AS teen. The review notes:

The melodrama of this is heavy, but Balthazar has a cause. He also wrote the novel the film is based on, and was inspired by a true story of a 17-year-old autistic boy from Brussels who committed suicide after being bullied.

Bullying is an enormous problem in schools and elsewhere; difference is rarely treated kindly by the mainstream. Bullying can cause mental health problems such as loss of self-esteem and severe depression. People on the spectrum may be vulnerable to bullying in more than one way: because they are different from "the norm," because they may not understand the bulling is happening until a later time, because they may not be able to communicate that bulling is happening, and because they may not be believed about the bullying or have appropriate action taken if they do report it (among other possible issues).

Dawn Prince-Hughes writes poignantly about her bulling experiences in her book Songs of the Gorilla Nation,

"People would corner me in the bathroom and force my head into the toilet, slam me into my locker, and throw trash at me in the hall. They hit me in the head with books and spit on me. They defaced my locker. They took my food away. One of the senior students made a sign with a derogatory word on it and hung it around my neck. I didn't take it off. To me, the words people shouted at me, their thoughts about me being crazy, the ways they treated me, were all as real as the sign, and I couldn't take them off. I was swimming in a sea of ugliness, hate, and intolerance; what good would it do to remove a cardboard sign. I didn't have the energy."

Bullying isn't just reserved for so-called "peers" either--teachers also may participate in the bullying. Also in Songs of the Gorilla Nation Dawn Prince Hughes relates being so abused by a teacher that she began going into a dissociative state when the teacher interacted with her. She says, "I never told my parents about it. It didn't occur to me that I could communicate about things that happened. I simply wasn't able to understand that use of words." Unfortunately, actions like Wendy Portillo's are not as rare as one might hope.

Regardless of whether the movie "Ben X" is worth viewing, the issue of school bullying is definitely worth examining.

Dora Raymaker
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