Victim’s Family Wants End to Bullying

Bullies had been haunting high school freshman Teddy Molina for years, making fun of him for having a mixed racial background and threatening to even kill him.

A group of kids who went by the name “The Wolf Pack” were the criminals. The bullying grew so bad Molina wound up leaving his school in Corpus Christi, Texas, last month. He ultimately took his life with a hunting rifle.

Molina’s death has triggered outrage in his South Texas community.

“We need to come together and we need to stop this, and we need to do it peacefully,” his sister, 18-year-old senior Misa Molina, said to MSNBC.com.

According to statistics from Family First Aid, around 30% of teenagers in the U.S. have been involved in bullying, either as a bully or as a victim of teenage bullying. Studies have found that teenage bullying is more common among younger teens.

However, the truth may be that young teens are more prone to physical bullying, which is easier to identify, and that older teens are more sophisticated in methods of bullying, using tactics such as cyber-bullying.

Research has also concluded that physical bullying is more common among boys, and teenage girls often prefer verbal and emotional bullying.

“He kept a lot of it to himself because he did not want the family to know that they were being derogatory toward his family,” his sister said, noting that Molina was a fun-loving kid who enjoyed hunting, fishing, and being around his family.  “He internalized a lot of his pain–he did confide in some of his friends.”

While there are no hard and fast statistics linking bullying to suicide, Dr. Melissa Reeves, a school psychologist and expert on bullying, said harassment by peers can be a “big factor” in youth suicide.

There are a number of effects that come with teenage bullying. First of all, there are the obvious physical problems and injuries that can result from physical bullying. However, emotional, verbal, and cyber bullying can deeply affect teens as well. These activities can lead to depression and even suicide, drug use, and stunted social development. These are problems that can affect a person well into adulthood.

“When they really get to a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, you know, where they see no other way out of this particular situation, then, unfortunately that is when we do see completed suicides,” Reeves, chair of a National Association of School Psychologists’ Prepare Working Group on Crisis Prevention and Intervention, said.

Family, classmates, and community members gathered outside the school following Ted Molina’s funeral to call for an end to bullying.