Ohio Parent Files Federal Lawsuit Against Teachers Who Harassed, Bullied Her Son

An 11-year-old boy says that he was harassed and humiliated at school for having long hair. The boy, who lives in Milford, Ohio, in the greater Cincinnati area, says the bullying he endured included being forced to wear his hair in pigtails and being taunted with girls’ names. What shocked his mother most, however, was that the chief culprits in the boy’s harassment were a teacher and a teacher’s aide, reported a Cincinnati.com story on Jan. 26.

The boy’s mother, Amanda Anoai, has taken the case to court in a federal lawsuit that claims that the boy was paraded before his classmates with his hair styled into pigtails, while his teachers encouraged his classmates to hurl gender-based abuse at him. Anoai also alleges that the teacher, Tori Bothe, used her cell phone to photograph him. The boy was so badly traumatized, she says, that he had to be taken out of the school and sent to classes elsewhere. “They had no reason to touch my son, to embarrass him, to make him feel bad,” says Anoai.

“He shouldn’t have to switch elementaries and start over,” Anoai, who now needs to drive her son a considerable distance to and from school, added. “We’ve had to change our lives because of this.”

The suit is based partly on the claim that adults were the perpetrators of the bullying, and partly on the claim that the school’s administration did nothing to intervene. The lawyer representing the family, Eric Deters, said that the boy was made the object of harassment throughout the school. “It wasn’t enough to humiliate him in one class, they had to march him around to other classes,” said Deters.

Currently, forty-four states have laws on the books regarding school bullying. The six that have no such laws are Montana, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, North Dakota and South Dakota, along with the District of Columbia. In Massachusetts, anti-gay activists have lobbied lawmakers against safe schools legislation, claiming that gays would use such laws to “indoctrinate” children into some sort of homosexual “lifestyle.”

Last April 5, a Springfield, Massachusetts 11-year-old boy killed himself after enduring anti-gay taunts and bullying at school; it was the fourth suicide of a young student of 2009. A fifth suicide followed less than a month later in Atlanta, Georgia, where there are anti-bullying laws on the books. However, those laws apply to grades 6-12; the Atlanta suicide victim was in the fifth grade.