The crushing of 12-year-old Ritchard (online blog).

BY: Andrew Bolt.

 THE bullying of Casey Heynes, a student at Sydney’s Chifley College, is a story meant to end with a happy-ever-after. You’ve already seen it sketched out on television, in the papers, on talkback and online.
 The theme is as old as human cruelty, and almost as popular. A friendless fat boy who has been picked on since primary school finally turns on his latest tormentor—some punk who punched him in the head, and shaped for more—and body-slams him into the concrete.
 One of the bully’s mates films the lot, as is now customary when someone is assaulted right in front of your snotty nose, and puts it up on YouTube, demonstrating that today’s children can be both morally retarded and technologically advanced. Bingo! Casey, who turns out to be emotionally wise at just 15, becomes a worldwide hero, and the bully an international villain…
 And straight away this nice morality tale—the revenge fantasy made flesh—starts to fall to pieces, and a long-neglected pit of misery lies exposed, right under our feet. You see, the bully, Ritchard Gale, is just 12 years old.
 How many people—let alone year 7 boys—have had so much hatred heaped on them this week, whether it’s through vilification on national television here and in the United States, or the most vicious emails and postings to internet sites?
 Here are some very typical examples among thousands, taken from postings to YouTube: “7 people thought Casey should have curb-stomped the f...er after he slammed him...if every bully like him died the world would be a better place”. No wonder that when Channel 7 decided for some cruelly selfish reason to interview Ritchard on Today Tonight—and I repeat, he’s just 12—he finally started to cry.
 His father Peter also cried, from fear and the pain of humiliation more public and more personal than he could ever have believed possible.
 “All I’m going to say is ‘Stop’,” he wept. “We’ve had enough.”
But nothing is so merciless as righteous indignation, and the bullying of Casey Heynes has in turn licensed the inner bully in so many adults, who now do to a 12-year-old what they claim to deplore when he did it to Casey. Have you ever before seen a mere boy stuck on a chair on national television to be told he’s a bully with an “anger problem” who should say sorry?
 It’s scandalous. Who is looking after his interests? What money changed hands to buy his public scolding?
 And what possible good do all these finger-waggers imagine they are doing, throwing this boy into the maw of their great ratings monster? It is perfectly true Ritchard acted like a thug, even if we were to accept as true his claim that Casey had been “calling me an idiot and stuff”.
 But that ‘t’ in his name—a semi-literate protest against the sheer ordinariness of the underclass—already hinted at what seeing him and his father confirmed. Ritchard has a rat’s-tail haircut and a stud in his eyebrow—more cries of assertion through store-bought rebellion.
 He was caught between defiance and pride at this attention, at last, and the sorry that his father had to signal him into making. He claimed to have been bullied himself at school until he’d resolved to hit those who’d hurt him, much as we now cheer Casey for having done: “If people say stuff I just chase ‘em. Hit ‘em.”
 Indeed, that YouTube video starts with Ritchard confronting Casey with: “Have you been talking s...?” And then we see Ritchard’s father, with missing teeth, exhausted eyes and wild hair, as if dragged through life backwards by his ankles.
 As we may have guessed, he’s separated from Ritchard’s mother, also missing teeth and defiant. “Not making excuses, but it’s been hard for me,” he pleads. “I’ve been trying to do the right thing by him and teaching him the right ways.” Uh huh. And what are the right ways to get on in North St Mary’s, a suburb that the local council’s social plan valiantly describes as “a typical post-war working-class Australian community”, to which has been added large Pacific Islander and Arabic-speaking communities, plus the leavings of the welfare state—part of that exciting diversity we’re told in Government ads is our “strength”.
 There the Chifley College’s Dunheved Campus, which Casey and Ritchard both attend, battles the uneasy consequences, noting on its website that “our families come from 15 diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds”.
 Absenteeism is high, academic results are low and the school warns (or merely concedes) that it imposes “reasonable and fair discipline that fosters resilience in our students”. So how did such fostering of “resilience” work for Casey?
 Now in year 10, he says he has been bullied for eight years. One punch broke something in his nose. He was duct-taped to a pole. The fear and loneliness, he says, made him contemplate suicide.
 He claims he wrote more than 60 incident reports to the school about the bullying, yet never got a break from the harassment. Any suspended student soon came back. Oh, yes, blame the school, if you wish. Many have, hacking into its website and sending foul abuse to the principal.
 But have any of you worked in such a school, with such parents and such children? Have you any idea what some of our grimmer suburbs are really like, where a boy like Ritchard can even now consider a lecture from Today Tonight as a seeming sign of success, and smile? Blame the school, but note that Casey’s father, also missing teeth, says he had no idea his son had been quite so bullied these past eight years. None.
 “How many years have you put up with this sort of treatment?’ he asked rhetorically. (Of Casey’s mother we hear nothing.) Oh, pray for these kids. If you’ve seen Casey, you’d agree there is something there to save. He has a level-headedness. An insight. A modesty. A clarity of expression and phlegmatic disposition: “School isn’t going to last forever.”
 In another environment I wonder what might be made of him. But now he and his father have decided he won’t be going back to school, or at least not to this one. Maybe, he says, he’ll one day go to a TAFE college. For now, at least, Casey has the world’s attention and an affirmation any such boy, so lonely for so long, would crave. Would need. “I’ve never had so much support,” he grins shyly.
 And as he checks all his messages of support, the television shows again and again what won him this fame and approval: again and again, we see him picking up a 12-year-old and hurling him onto the concrete, head first, back first, neck first, leg first, whatever…
 And today, in hard-scrabble towns and suburbs around this divided land, the mutinously anonymous sons of defeated anonymous parents slope from their torn and impassive homes to brave the asphalt battlegrounds of their torn and impassive schools.
 What have we just taught them? Have we any idea what we’re doing?