It Keeps Happening: 9-year-old boy Commits Suicide After Bullying Because He Was Gay

Since someone came into office, bullies of all kinds have felt vilified in their bad behavior and in August a 9-year-old boy killed himself on Thursday, Aug. 23 after he was reportedly bullied at school for being gay.

 9-year-old boy Commits Suicide After Bullying Because He Was Gay

DENVER -- A Denver mom wants to shine a light on bullying and suicide after the death of her son last week. The woman said her son killed himself in their home on Thursday. He was 9 years old.
    Leia Pierce says bullying was a factor in the death of her son, Jamel Myles. He started fourth grade at Joe Shoemaker Elementary School on Monday.
    Over the summer, his mom said he came out to her as gay.
    "And he looked so scared when he told me. He was like, 'Mom I’m gay.' And I thought he was playing, so I looked back because I was driving, and he was all curled up, so scared. And I said, I still love you," Pierce said.
     Pierce said her son wanted to tell his classmates.  "He went to school and said he was gonna tell people he’s gay because he’s proud of himself," she said.Pierce said when he came out, he opened up about wanting to dress more femininely.
     "And he goes, 'Can I be honest with you?'" Pierce said. "And I was like sure, and he’s like, 'I know you buy me boy stuff because I’m a boy, but I’d rather dress like a girl.'"
On Thursday, four days into the school year, Jamel took his own life. Pierce found her son dead in their Denver home. She said he killed himself after being bullied.
"Four days is all it took at school. I could just imagine what they said to him," Pierce said. "My son told my oldest daughter the kids at school told him to kill himself. I’m just sad he didn’t come to me."
A letter from Denver Public Schools to families sent Friday said it's providing extra social workers and its crisis team for students.
"I’m so upset that he thought that was his option," Pierce said.
In the statement, the district said it will continue to offer support to the family.
Through the devastation, Pierce wants to spread awareness about the effects of bullying.
"We should have accountability for bullying. I think the child should. Because the child knows it’s wrong. The child wouldn’t want someone to do it to them. I think the parent should be held because obviously the parents are either teaching them to be like that, or they’re treating them like that," she said.
She said she hopes no parent ever has to go through this pain because their child is different from everyone else.

In the news: Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men

Do you know Chechnya is Executing Gay Men?  THIS IS HAPPENING NOW IN CHECHNYA:  It's like Nazi Germany all over again, but this time it's Russia. They're executing gay men simply because they're gay. What's very unsettling is that the Trump administration supports Russia and is saying nothing about this (and Mike Pence is likely happy about it, given his hatred of gay people).

Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Paper Says

Source: NY Times (click for link to story) 

MOSCOW — First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya.

Maxim Shemetov / ReutersChechnya’s leader claims there are no gay people in the Russian region. A gay rights activist is seen being detained by police during an LGBT community rally in Moscow in 2015.

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

    While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.

     The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.

   By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

   A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”

   “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.

     “If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

The sweep, like so much else in Russian politics today, was entangled in the country’s troubled politics of street activism.

     It began, Novaya Gazeta reported, after a Moscow-based gay rights group, GayRussia.ru, applied for permits to stage gay pride parades in four cities in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya is a part.

      The group had not focused on the Muslim areas. It had been applying for permits for gay parades in provincial cities around Russia, and collecting the inevitable denials, in order to build a case about gay rights and freedom of assembly with the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. It had applied to more than 90 municipal governments. Nikolai Alekseev, a gay rights activist coordinating this effort, told Novaya Gazeta he had chosen this tactic rather than staging risky, unsanctioned gay parades.

   Gay men have begun deleting online accounts, or fleeing the region. 

 One user of Vkontakte, a Russian social networking site, wrote that a 16-year-old boy had been detained in a village in Chechnya. He returned days later, according to the post, “all beaten, just a sack with bones.”

   The newspaper published contact information to aid men wanting to leave Chechnya for relatively more tolerant parts of Russia. But reaching communities of closeted gay men in the remote mountain region poses challenges.  “Even delivering the information is very difficult,” Ms. Sokiryanskaya, who is familiar with the aid effort, said. “They are just small islands, isolated.”