Everyone Does It ... ?

Juvenile adolescents, priding themselves on their maturity do justice to the low opinion in which they are held by their betters. It is just as well that these delusional teens who believe they have the 'right' to impose their version of ritual unwelcome by way of "froshing" on younger teens newly introduced to high school, are in a decided minority.

They feel completely justified in their attitudes that this is innocent fun, and it's perfectly all right since 'everyone does it'.

And it's highly unlikely that they will evolve, mature socially, as they grow older. These are the types of personalities that simply mature into a greater sense of entitlement at the expense of other people, who feel they are always right in whatever they do, and that complaints against their attitudes are unwarranted and unjustified.

Which led a group of Grade 12 students to exit their classes to protest the suspension of one of their own. Mostly young women, it would appear, with large smiles, posing for the photographers. And holding aloft signs protesting the unfair treatment of one of their own, obviously a young man held in esteem by these young women.

Declaring themselves convinced that the suspended teen, in his last year of high school, and being transferred to another school in the Ottawa Carleton District School Board was being dealt unfairly with. He was, after all, only having a bit of innocent fun. Driving his car with two other friends within, all of them tossing eggs at new Grade 9 students.

And in the process, crushing the back wheel of a bicycle being walked by a Grade 9 boy. And, thinking nothing of it, continuing on his way. The driver was later suspended by school authorities, the other two with him receiving ten-day suspensions each. It was a very small group of Grade 12s that were involved in the "froshing". That's the good news.

The bad news is that it happens at all. That Grade 9 students at Nepean High School must dread having eggs, urine, bleach, flour or whatever else takes the fancy of the bullies, tossed at them. Police have charged the suspended teen with failure to report a collision, under the provincial Highway Traffic Act. If he is found guilty, he will face a fine between $400 and $2000.

As a much-needed antidote to the bad taste of a group of teen-age girls carrying signs in support of their 17-year-old oafish friend who found humour in harassing younger students, a former Nepean High School student, now a Queen's University student, expressed his feelings, that he was "ashamed to see the resurgence that froshing has made into the culture of the school."

Nick Roy explained he served formerly as the director of a school program whose purpose it was to assist new students to integrate into the school. Before the initiation of the integration program in 2006, he said, froshing incidents were "very widespread and common" at the school.

The initiation rituals of froshing and hazing, had become "abnormal" in the years since the integration program was established, he said.

A resurgence since then of the bullying of new students was a surprise to him, the protests of other students represented an "undermining of the moral integrity sought by the (integration) program ... and "undoing years of progress" in fashioning a more integrated student body.

"You cannot paint a picture of froshing as something that 'everyone does' when the reality is that the vast, vast majority of students at NHS will not have any part of it."

Clearly, the statements issued by Nick Roy represent an antidote to the disgraceful conduct of the suspended teens, and of their supporters, happy to carry signs protesting the unjust treatment of their friends, content with the knowledge that their friends' bullying behaviour represented a reversal of decent societal norms.