Oxnard, CA school's handling of gay student's behavior comes

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'Sexual predator' is too much, 'in-your-face with his sexuality' is too little. Sexual harrasment sounds about right.

The perpetrator deserves blame for killing the victim, the victim (no quotes necessary) deserves blame for sexual harassment, and the school deserves blame for not taking reasonable action.

But the victim most certainly didn't deserve to die.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Being fifteen and gay is not that uncommon. Being fifteen and killing people is very uncommon. Many fifteen year olds are in much worse situations, and they do not kill people.

As for the school, this is California, and while I will agree with tolerent, I think they need a dress code. That would be a nightmare to enforce.

Sexting is common, letting your whole school see you nude, teens do flirt, even when alone, and the Tease has long been around, just playing with sex drives, which also produced a degree of frustration.

It has never been a reason to kill people.

As for being emotionally disturbed, they both grew up in California.

There can be no defense, Twinkies have been used, everybody knows there are several homosexuals living openly in San Francisco, it is the common background they grew up in.

One person is dead, and he cannot be tried for causing his own death.

The other brought a gun to school and killed a classmate.

No other school child in all of America did that, just him, and it was Murder in cold blood.

Today it was another, killed his principal with a knife because he did not like her.

Teen killers do not stop, they are some of the worst. Long ago a girl died in Tacoma, it was never solved, but later it came out the paperboy was Ted Bundy.

Do you really expect him to go from playing Wii straight to lewd behavior in public, molesting kids, stalking and possibly killing men he is infatuated with and can't have, and downloading child porn? No, but the gay kid was on a roll. He targeted a kid he figured he could antagonize with his sexuality and he kept escalating the situation and the principals encouraged the behavior. There are claims that he was killed in an act of hypermasculine bravado, but the shooter has no history of bulling the gay kid before the shooting. He never showed any intention of wanting to be cool, but he did show a desperate desire to stop being degraded. It's not just the constant barrage of carefully calculated harassment that got to him, but there was also a social stigma to being subjected to such treatment and having to put up with it, which in middle school will draw even more ridicule- and the administration defended and even promoted it despite the pleas of his teacher! He may not have deserved to die, but the people who controlled the power to intervene long before the situation got anywhere near the point it did openly refused to.



In most states, a minor who takes a nude picture of themself can be charged with child pornography, can do jail time, and have to register as a sex offender. The chances of getting charged go up if they distribute it- especially if it goes to any minors. If there are any criminal complaints, espoecially from minors that received it, the number of possible charges go up. Anyone who receives it and either keeps it or forwards it is also prosecutable. They have to delete it immediately. If an 18 year old high school senior takes a nude picture of themself, and they send it to any minor classmates, if there is any criminal complaints, they can also potentially be prosecuted and have to register as a sex offender. That may sound draconian, but there are currently no laws that specifically address sexting and it would be a slippery slope to try because it would create an easily abuseable loophole in the law.

In retrospect, the teachers and school administrators should have told the victim to cut the burlesque show. But it's still not a capital offense.
And just where the hell did you get the idea that this kid was going to grow up to watch child pornography (by the way, one of the greatest myths out there is that gays and pedophiles are one in the same - they are not), or that he was going to kill men he couldn't have? The fact of the matter is, serial killers and sexual sadists make up only a tiny minority of the general population, gay or straight. There was no reason to believe, from the limited information given in the article, that the victim was ever going to grow up to be one.
As for the shooter - to say that he lived in fear of bullying from his victim is mere conjecture, as I don't recall the article going very far into his motivation. And just because he never expressed any homophobia, or let alone acted on it before the shooting, doesn't mean that he didn't have that inside, boiling over.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

This would've been a lose-lose situation either way. Even if the teachers and administration got involved, what are the chances that the student would've pulled the discrimination card on them?

Either way I don't believe sexual harassment is a reason to kill someone, especially if they're teenagers in high school.

It just sucks that people aren't using their brains as far as handling situations involving people of different sexual orientation. Everyone wants to play victim whenever sexual orientation is involved.

I think one of John_Browning's points bears notice--we are dealing with a young offender here.

It is, at the end of the day, persumptuous of us to imagine that we know the totality of this young person's circumstances, nor can we opine what is in his best interest. I think both John_Browning's advocacy for mitigation and others' posts in repudiation fall short of the mark. At the end of the day, he is entitled to raise every defence and every mitigating factor that is relevant to his circumstances, and it will remain for a judge to determine where his best interests lie.

Leniency towards young offenders should never be misinterpreted as a failure to consider their offenses to be serious.

If the mere possibility that someone could say 'discrimination', whether or not they're right, could make them not stop a clear case of sexual harassment out of fear, then that's seriously messed up.

The administration was not between a rock and a hard place, they were between a rock and open ocean. It's a shame they picked the rock.

+1. Young people are still developing, and they have a reduced ability to control their actions due to hormonal changes. It doesn't excuse him for the killing. It is just taking into consideration that if the murderer were older, he might have not resorted to murder. At 15 from my current age of 19, I made a huge leap in understanding and capability.

From what I am getting from this story, a gay student was sexually harassing another student. The "victim" of the sexual harrassment brought a gun to school and shot the boy. Both are victims of each other in some way. Unfortunately to both, the murderer overreacted. Just by that merit alone, he is a danger to society and needs to be locked up for a long time.

If he has to resort to murder to solve his problems, he shouldn't be on the streets.



+1 (again). I am part of the LGBT community, and I do not think it would be discrimination at all to have charged the gay boy with sexual harrassment.

If a young girl was constantly being hit on by one of her male peers, to the point she felt uncomfortable, that would be merit for sexual harrassment. Just because you substitute it so it is same sex doesn't make it less so.

That's why administrators are supposed to apply the rule book the same way to everyone. It was established that it was okay for the gay student to play Tinkerbell at school because there was not rule in the book about that. However, he was required to obey the dress code because there was a rule in the book about that. Likewise, the gay student should have been disciplined for sexual harassment because not only is there a rule in the book about that, but it usually falls under most district's zero tolerance policy. If any of the straight kids retaliated against the gay kid after he was already disciplined, there are several rules against that. It was possible for the administrators and teacher to cite the rule book in every disciplinary or mediation measure they did and could have made it work equally for everybody.

The only problem with the mediation would have been you could move the gay kid and the straight kids he was harassing away from each other, but the gay kid was bound to find new targets if he was not given mental health services as well. Each new mediation for each new person he was antagonizing (stopped shot before becoming harassment) would have slowly secluded him more and more until there was no choice but to take drastic action. Hence my earlier comment about the emotionally disturbed class.

I am also a member of the LGBTA community and I think the school handled this wrongly in not dealing with the gay teen's sexual advances.
I dont find anything wrong with his dress though...but unwanted sexual advances by anyone is not cool.

However, should the boy die for that? No...he needed to be corrected, not killed. With peak hormones, LGBT teens can make the same errors in judgement as straight teens often do in sexual behaviors, the straight kids arnt often killed for it. I have been sexually harrassed by many straight males in high school, so dont tell me it doesnt happen.
That is the school's job to punish.
I would not even be upset by a good ol' punch in the face, but death is too harsh.
A broken nose would be a good reminder not to do that again.

Anyway for someone to resort to murder to solve a conflict has fundamental issues that are a threat to society.
So a light sentance would not help anyone.
I agree with Inventor that teen killers are the worst kind of killers. Unchecked they grow up to be serial killers or very violent people. It is just not a normal response to kill someone for that reason. However antisocial personality disorder does not fully develop until mid to late teens which might explain teen killers.
Even with all the sexual harasment I got in school...I never wanted to kill my tormentors. I did cast a spell on one of them once...to my surprise it worked.

However, the school should be held responcible for this as well, for they allowed this situation to develop by not doing anything

Jojo

You gotta tell me: what kind of spell, and what happened?

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Okay I was on the school bus and one of my bullies/sexual harrassers was yamering away me with sexually loaded taunts. I had my tarot cards on the bus playing with them (a gift from a lover of sorts) and I just picked up the jester card and cast a spell that he would shut up. within two seconds or so, he turned around and was quiet the rest of the trip. I was rather freaked out about 45 minutes later and he still said nothing which is very unlike him. So I took the spell off and he went back to yammering at me a bunch of stupid BS. Which then freaked me out even more. I gave my friend my tarrot cards after that. But then I got involved in Wicca later in life, knowing it was real and I had to be responsible with what I was doing. I been kinda in and out of it since then.

I would have been tempted to burst the a**hole's organs.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I am rather non-violent...even when I should be.
However, mental warfare, that is another story

Okay, so a quick timeline:

1) King starts sexually harrasing a group of boys
2) The school does nothing to stop this, even though they know King is placing himself in danger
3) One of the boys murders King

Now, lets see what happens if we, ah, "straighten out" the timeline:

1) Boy is sexually harrassing a girl
2) The school does nothing to stop this
3) Girl murders boy

The question is, would this be grounds for leniency for the girl, and if so, why should it not be for the boy in the first situation?