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Will new legislation stop bullying problem in school?

Open any newspaper or click on any homepage these days and they're impossible to miss.

A recent spike in stories about teens who commit suicide after being tormented at the hands of schoolyard bullies has left many readers with a sense these tragedies could have been avoided. The question is how?

It's that enormous question mark that has spurred us to look at what parents, educators, the government, and in extreme cases, even the police could be doing to prevent teens like Marjorie Raymond from believing death is the only solution.

Last week, the 15-year-old from Ste-Anne-des-Monts, Que., became the latest student to take her own life due to bullying, aided, in part by the long-reaching, invisible hands of her tormentors.

Her distraught mother released her daughter's suicide note, in which Marjorie blamed her classmates for making life unbearable, and said she could no longer cope with the bullying that had transformed her life and made it a constant torment for the past three years.

"I have a hard time leaving this world, but I think it will be for a better world," she wrote in the letter. "It's the fault of the jealous people who only want to destroy our happiness," adding that she hoped her mother would forgive her for her actions.

In October, 15-year-old Ottawa teen Jamie Hubley committed suicide after being tormented over his sexual orientation.

And in a profoundly heartbreaking example of bullying's psychological impact on our most vulnerable, 11-year-old Mitchell Wilson, a sixth-grader with muscular dystrophy, killed himself after being mugged by a 12-year-old boy from his Pickering, Ont. school.

Buoyed by increasing pressure, Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty recently introduced new legislation that would subject schoolyard bullies to tougher measures.

The legislation, presented during Question Period last Wednesday, outlined what it considered "inappropriate student behaviour," including bullying, gender-based violence, sexual assault and incidents related to homophobia and would impose a legal obligation on school boards to take stronger measures against bullies, including expulsion.

Early reaction to the bill has been mostly positive. The National Post's Kelly McParland praised the move to expel the offenders rather than force the victims to change schools in order to escape their daily torment.

While he cautions against the type of "over-reaching" that may engender hypersensitivity to anything deemed "offensive " — like bans on symbols of spiritual belief, or putting a kibosh on balls in the playground because someone once got hit — he feels going too far is better than not doing enough, adding that for every child who ends his or her life, countless others simply suffer in silence.

Though McGuinty's bill won't guarantee the eradication of bullying by any measure, perhaps the introduction of a tougher set of consequences may deter a few schoolyard brutes from thinking they can get away with their destructive behaviour.

And if that results in a few more children who may be salvaged from resorting to desperate measures in order to escape the pain, it is at the very least, a leap in the right direction.

(CBC Photo)