As soon as the jury announced its verdict in the case of Dharun Ravi last week, I wondered what the lessons were that we could impart to our students. You may remember that Dharun Ravi was the Rutgers University student who had trained his webcam on his roommate Tyler Clementi while Clementi kissed another man in their dorm room. As you will also no doubt recall, three days later, Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge in a case that riveted us in 2010. Two years ago, we knew that the only thing worse than the death of this young man and the ruined life of his roommate, whose boorish prank had gone far beyond what he ever could have known, was if we failed to learn something from this tragedy. Now that a court has judged Ravi, we can look again at what we can tell our children so that perhaps history will not repeat itself.
While it was Clementi’s death that made headline news, the shock and pain that he experienced is shared by many other Gay/Lesbian/Transgender/Bisexual/Questioning (GLTBQ) teens who wrestle with suicidal thoughts. Study after study shows the disparity between the rates of attempted or considered suicide by gay and lesbian adolescents versus their heterosexual counterparts. Movements like the It Gets Better project may help young men and women in need of solace, but there is still much work to be done. Many commentators have pointed out that younger Americans seem to be more and more comfortable with gays in the military, in public roles, and gay marriage; however, middle and high schools remain treacherous places for adolescents to come out. Many years ago when a parent criticized me for speaking out on behalf of gay teens, I tried to explain that this was not about politics; this was about making sure that every child in every one of our schools feels physically and psychologically safe to be who she or he is.
Perhaps a second lesson is how we can teach our students to be comfortable with those who are different than they are and how to be vigilant in their protection of the rights of their peers. All too often, teens, like their parents, gravitate toward those people who most resemble themselves. While that may be understandable, it precludes their learning more about the world and the blessings that come from being part of a group of people with a variety of likes, dislikes, and interests. Although Lord of the Flies may have been written in 1954, the mob mentality that characterized that story can still seen today. As Tyler Clementi’s father pleaded after the conviction of Ravi, “You’re going to meet a lot of people in our lifetime…Some of these people you may not like. Just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean you have to work against them. When you see somebody doing something wrong, tell them: ‘That’s not right. Stop it.’ The change you want to see in the world begins with you.”
Another lesson that we can learn from the dorm room events in the fall of 2010 is that we have given our teens tools that can damage lives far beyond their comprehension. It is not being a Luddite to fear how quickly machines can allow events to spiral out of our control. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have created tools that benefit us greatly, but we have put them in the hands of children without training in ethics or morality. We know this intuitively, and we see examples of this on a daily basis, but we do nothing to change it, or we throw up our hands and acknowledge defeat. Some accounts of the Tyler Clementi story indicate that Ravi was neither evil nor homicidal; his actions were mean-spirited and cruel, but he most likely never realized where his malicious taping of Clementi would end. For that reason, we can be both infuriated and sad at the lives wasted from a nasty joke gone tragically wrong.
One young man is dead at his own hands and another may spend many valuable years of his life in jail. If we don’t make this profoundly painful story into a morality tale for our children, then shame on us as educators and as parents.
