12.05
You send your kid to school and he might come home unable to ever have children. “Ball Tapping” is evidently a game that male students are participating in. The rules are that you surprise another male by kicking him in the genitals in the hall between classes. Boy, that sounds like great fun doesn’t it. Unfortunately, I’ve been the victim of stuff like this before. A big kid did this to me when I was in the seventh grade. I was waiting for the bus in the gravel parking lot behind the school when he came up behind me. When I turned around he kicked me square in-between the legs. He must have hit me with tremendous force because I blacked out for a few seconds and woke up on the gravel in severe pain.
Guess how many teachers ran to my aid? None. My friend David helped me up, and the kid was too big for me to retaliate against so I just did what most bullied kids do. Nothing. Think it’s hard to believe my story? Think it’s crazy to think I wouldn’t have told my parents? Well, here’s exhibit A:
Jake Arend doesn’t need survey results to convince him ball tapping is a serious problem.
Classmates began hitting him in the groin when he was in sixth grade and it continued for years.
“I was just the scrawny kid everybody picked on to make themselves look better,” Arend said. “If you get hit in that area, you just want to fall and cry, but I tried not to.”
By the time Jake got to Danville High School, he says he was being ball tapped every week – sometimes even three or four times a day.
“Sometimes it would be just the flick of a wrist, and there was one time I actually got hit in the area with a socket wrench,” he recalled. “When I got hit with that, I actually just hit the ground and just laid there in the fetal position for five to ten minutes for the pain to go away, then I got up and went to class.”
Jake never told his parents and he never told his teachers, fearing the bullies at school would hit him ever harder if they got in trouble.
“I just thought ‘It’s pain. I’ll deal with it,’” said Arend.
Please, parents. Realize that when you send your kid to state prison, school, that you give up any control over them and what happens to them. If joining the PTA or some such thing makes you feel better then you are kidding yourself. The state owns your kid for 8 hours a day, and they don’t give a rat’s a– what happens to them. And, please don’t give me the “boys will be boys” argument. You’re not allowed to use that argument unless you’ve been beat up by a bully at least a few times a year for your entire elementary school experience. If you haven’t then go blow that crap somewhere else. I don’t want to hear it.
