When 9 year old Jamel Myles told his mother, Leia Pierce, he was gay on a summer car ride, Pierce told him she still loved him. Jamel was excited about being accepted, and open about who he was. Within a matter of weeks, however, Myles—who was subjected to vicious taunts and bullying at school—had hanged himself in his bedroom.
Jamel's story, which you can read about in this NBC News Report, sparked a national debate about bullying and intolerance. While it is always hard to diagnose the specifics of what went wrong from afar, we still have a moral obligation to learn from such tragedies. October is National Bullying Prevention Month, and over the following weeks we will be exploring the subject of bullying in more detail. But for now, we invite you to join us in reflecting on the following questions to think about how your organization currently addresses bullying: