At 4 o’clock this afternoon, NYRA-Southeast Florida filed their lawsuit against the city of West Palm Beach, Florida. After months of attempting to negotiate with the city council to repeal their unconstitutional curfew law, the chapter has now taken their battle to federal court.
NYRA is making history!
This is the first time a NYRA chapter has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the rights of youth. This is also, as far as we are aware, the first time a youth-led civil rights organization has filed a lawsuit against a curfew law anywhere in the country.
Earlier this month the Rochester, NY curfew law was struck down in court, now it is our turn!
NYRA-SEFL is working with veteran civil rights attorney Barry Silver who successfully fought West Palm Beach on another matter. Jeffrey Nadel, chapter president, is confident Silver will beat the city once more. First the curfew in Rochester fell, soon West Palm Beach’s curfew will fall as well, and NYRA is leading the charge!
Could this be the case that makes it to the US Supreme Court? Could NYRA-SEFL v. West Palm Beach be remembered for all time as the case that eradicated all curfew laws? Only time will tell.
NYRA members have led successful efforts against curfews in New York, Missouri, New Jersey, Washington, DC and elsewhere around the country. This is NYRA’s first effort through the courts.
If you want to help, please write a letter to the editor of the West Palm Beach Post and tell them what you think of NYRA-SEFL’s suit against their curfew law: letters@pbpost.com (be polite though)
With the new DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V) coming out in 2012 , version 5 has already been marred in controversy, lack of transparency, and predictably, an increase in the number of contributors with industry ties (nearly 70%)–up 14% from the last installment. What does this mean for young people? We can probably expect more “disorders” in the near future, and with “Bipolar Disorder” crawling down into the cradle these days, the probability doesn’t seem so far off. We already have kids as young as four on psychoactive medications for conditions not proven to exist in childhood (expect them to be “proven to exist” in the near future), an over-abundance of ADHD diagnoses for kids who just need to play, and for teens, the old favorite–”Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”
What’s next? How about “Video Game Addiction,” a move to target young people by pathologizing their passtimes. How about the fact that the APA DSM revision team retained a certain professional by the name of Zucker who continues to procure psychiatric “treatments” for LGBT youth, with the belief that it is caused by “poor parenting.”
In this age where everyone and his uncle can be diagnosable, and particularly in light of all the targetted pathologizing of young people, perhaps it would be fun to throw the noose back at the society that is creating all these unnecessary “epidemics” with a taste of their own medication–a little something we can call “Over Protective Parental Disorder.” Let’s just try it on for size and see if it fits just as well: (more…)
Our country is shaken up today and trying to find answers, one day after the horrifying shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC by a racist, anti-semitic extremist, killing an innocent security guard named Stephen Johns, and it happened not two weeks after another crazy extremist gunned down Kansas abortion provider George Tiller.
Naturally, we have everyone talking about the problems in our society with bigotry and hate crimes, with the fear of more domestic terrorism from crazy extremists. With it comes another question. How do these people get so hateful?
While I of course do not have a definite answer on that, there is a rather large portion of the population that can very easily be made to learn only hate and denied any access to information contrary to the hate. Those people are children and teens.
Because “everyone knows” that it is a parent’s job to instill values into their children, that parents have a “right” to raise their children however they see fit, it is believed that parents have the “right” to decide what information and media their children receive. It’s a common fall-back our free speech allies use against video game restrictions and library censorship, that it should be the parents and not the government or any other non-parent entity who decides what children read, play, etc. In that particular no-win this-or-that, whether parents or the government should be deciding what kids should be reading or playing, obviously the parents is the option to go with, but it’s really annoying that to so many these are the only two options, completely ignoring the rather important third option of “neither”, that the kids themselves should be the only ones to make that decision. (more…)
One major issue with the high drinking age, paired with the high penalties of underage drinking, is that an underage drinker may be left in fear of seeking help in an emergency if he or she has had something to drink. This blog entry I read today highlights get another terrifying problem: sexual assault victims who are afraid to report the assault for fear that they’ll get arrested for underage drinking!
A few weeks back, I mentioned that a former student of mine had been hurt by an abusive boyfriend. The campus judicial hearing was last week. In it, the accuser had to face trial herself.
Here’s the problem: Underage drinking laws and the equivalent campus rules deter victims of violent crime from reporting. As I learned at the eleventh hour, after I’d already written my character reference and shown up for the hearing, my student also faced multiple charges against her! One of them was underage drinking. After the original incident, she’d been frank with the investigators and told them she’d had two beers much earlier in the day. This was used against her, with no corroborating evidence.
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My student’s problem is typical, I’m afraid. When dating violence and sexual assault occur on campus, alcohol is often part of the picture. Lots of assaults – sexual and otherwise – go unreported because the victims are afraid they’ll be punished for underage drinking. While this is a particularly pervasive problem on campus, it also potentially affects all women and girls who are underage.
This is just appalling! Are the people who keep insisting that the 21 drinking age is for safety really so blind to these horrible consequences? In their (false) insistent belief that the high drinking age saves lives, they are endangering young people, particularly girls, by forcing them into silence when they’re victimized and they happened to have had a drink.
Assault, especially sexual assault, is underreported even when alcohol isn’t involved, especially with young victims. Last thing these victims need is yet another reason to be afraid of coming forward with what an abuser did to them!
Worst part is, it makes me wonder if the pro-21 folks think the underage drinkers deserve it when these things happen to them! That there’s nothing wrong with victimizing someone who has committed the unforgivable sin of drinking before turning 21. For one, it would go to show in no uncertain terms that youth safety is very low on these people’s priority, but sadly it would mean they’re among the disgustingly high number of people who share the belief that if someone, generally a young woman, has engaged in some undesirable activity, like drinking underage, then she deserves whatever she gets.
So we need to lower the drinking age, so someone who has engaged in a harmless activity will not have to fear going to authorities when made the victim of a horrible harmful act of violence.
A number of news stories have come out lately about concerned groups seeking to ban books they find objectionable or inappropriate for kids, for a variety of reasons. One group in Wisconsin successfully got several teen books banned for depicting homosexuality. In Tennessee, some parents are trying to get books removed from library shelves for discussing sexual abuse, racism, self-cutting, and a number of other issues. They are also trying to remove a book about anorexia believing it would encourage teens to become anorexic. The list goes on.
The National Youth Rights Association opposes these efforts to “shield” teens from supposedly objectionable literature. Teenagers’ minds belong only to themselves and are not there for adults to mold as they wish. The only person who should be making decisions about what books a young person reads is that young person herself. Not her teachers. Not her principal. Not some “concerned” group of citizens. Not even her parents. She, and only she, is the one to make that decision. (more…)
I’m more inclined to agree with the first post here, but StudentActivism.net makes a good point that this case was about an injunction, not about the merits of the speech itself. Still, I can’t see how anyone could side with the high school on any issue related to this case.
According to Sam Stein in the Huffington Post, Sonia Sotomayor is “the odds-on favorite” to be chosen by Barack Obama to fill retiring Justice David Souter’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. She now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit in New York City. She is regularly described as liberal and a judicial activist - fine in my book - and it would good to have a first Hispanic and another woman on the Supreme Court.
But she has one major, very bad decision on free speech and press to her discredit, which should give everyone who values these freedoms in our society serious cause for concern about Sotomayor’s possible nomination to the High Court.
The decision came from Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court last May, regarding Lewis Mills High School student Avery Doninger. While running for Senior Class Secretary, Ms. Doninger found reason to object to the school’s cancellation of a “jamfest” event, and characterized those who scotched the event as “douchebags” on her off-campus LiveJournal blog (she also characterized a school official in that same blog posting as getting “pissed off”). The school officials, in turn, took umbrage, prohibited Avery from running for Class Secretary, and disregarded the plurality of votes she received, anyway, as a write-in candidate. Avery sued the school officials, and the Federal District Court supported the school. Avery appealed to Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court.
After acknowledging the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision, which held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Sotomayor’s Court proceeded to affirm the District Court’s ruling - that is, Sonia Sotomayor and her colleague justices upheld the high school’s right to punish Doninger for her off-campus speech. Their reasoning was that schools have an obligation to impart to their students “shared values,” which include not only the importance of free expression but a “proper respect for authority”.
“Proper respect for authority” … is this what our democratic society and freedom is based upon? Last time I checked, I thought our democracy and freedom were predicated on the principle that all people have a right to express their opinions, which must certainly include disrespect for authority, if actions by the authority - such as canceling a school event such as “jamfest” - are at issue.
Or as Constitutional scholar and law-professor Jonathan Turley put it about this decision last year, “The continual expansion of the authority of school officials over student speech teaches a foul lesson to these future citizens. I would prefer some obnoxious speech than teaching students that they must please government officials if they want special benefits or opportunities.”
Family says bullying led boy, 11, to hang himself
By CHRISTIAN BOONE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Dekalb County school officials are mum about allegations that bullying at Dunaire Elementary School may have led 11-year-old Jaheem Herrera to commit suicide last week.
Public information officer Dale Davis said Tuesday morning that officials are legally unable to comment on student-related records, such as whether Herrera’s mother Masika Bermudez had complained to the school about possible bullying.
On Thursday afternoon, after returning home from school, fifth-grader Jaheem quietly went into his room and hanged himself. His 10-year-old sister, Yerralis, also a fifth-grader, discovered Jaheem’s dead body.
“His sister was screaming, ‘Get him down, get him down,’” said Norman Keene, who helped raise Jaheem since the boy was two years old.
When Keene got to the room, he saw Yerralis holding her brother, trying to remove the pressure of the noose her brother had fashioned with a fabric belt.
Jaheem was bullied relentlessly, his family said. Keene said the family knew the boy was a target, but until his death they didn’t understand the scope.
“We’d ask him, ‘Jaheem, what’s wrong with you?’” Keene recalled. “He’d never tell us.”
He didn’t want his sister to tell, either. She witnessed much of the bullying, and many times rose to her brother’s defense, Keene said.
“They called him gay and a snitch,” his stepfather said. “All the time they’d call him this.”
In an interview with WSB-TV, Bermudez also said her son was being bullied at school. She said she had complained to the school.
She said she asked him about the bullying Thursday when he came home from school and he denied it. She sent him to his room to calm down. It was the last time she would see him alive.
Bermudez told WSB she talked to Jaheem’s best friend about the situation last week.
“He said, ‘Yes ma’am. He told me that he’s tired of everybody always messing with him in school. He is tired of telling the teachers and the staff, and they never do anything about the problems. So, the only way out is by killing himself,’ ” Bermudez told WSB.
Spokesman Davis said the school sent out a notice to parents alerting them to the death. A crisis team was sent to the school Friday and grief counselors are on hand to help students, he said.
Dekalb Public Schools are working to prevent issues such as bullying and to promote tolerance through a national program called “No Place for Hate,” said Jennifer Errion, assistant director of student support services, prevention-intervention.
The program, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and begun in Dekalb schools in 2007, helps train faculty and students on accepting differences, promoting diversity and inclusion.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Errion said of Herrera’s death. “Unfortunately, prevention is not a vaccine. We have a society that is often misguided. We’ve created the idea that bullying is a rite of passage, and I don’t think it is.”
Earlier this month the suicide of a Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover — who suffered taunts that he was gay — attracted national attention.
He was also 11. His mother found him hanging from an extension cord in the family’s home.
Jaheem was excelling academically, Keene said, adapting quickly to his new home. The family moved to the Avondale Estates area less than a year ago from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Last winter, his grandmother died from cancer. She was living with the family at the time.
His grandfather returned to St. Croix after his wife’s passing. He’s taking Jaheem’s death especially hard.
“He says he has nothing to live for now,” Keene said. The family had planned a trip home in June. They’ll be returning next Monday instead to bury their 11-year-old son.
Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. - Walt Disney
Why don't you 
