Peanut Butter- The Latest in Adolescent Bullying

Peanut Butter and Deadly Taunts

A Combination of Bullying and Peanut Allergies May Put Some Kids in the ER

By LAUREN COX
ABC News Medical Unit
April 17, 2008

Late last spring, 14-year-old Sarah VanEssendelft of Mastic, N.Y., experienced bullying worthy of a teen movie.

“There was a group of five girls … and they decided they didn’t want me sitting at their lunch table anymore,” said VanEssendelft. To get her to leave, they all brought in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

For VanEssendelft, it might as well have been arsenic.

Two weeks later, a boy in the back of her class opened up a peanut butter cup. The smell was enough to trigger VanEssendelft’s peanut allergy and send her to the emergency room with breathing problems.

“My throat felt tight and my lips were getting really swollen, really fast,” said VanEssendelft. “I looked like Angelina Jolie.”

On the one hand, mean tricks or sneaking candy looks like mild behavioral problems to school administrators. On the other hand, given VanEssendelft’s serious peanut allergy, those sandwiches might very well have been weapons.

…”They said, ‘oh, you just want attention, there’s no way you can be allergic to the smell, this isn’t true,’” said VanEssendelft. The five girls then held a meeting in the bathroom.

Luckily, VanEssendelft got wind of the secret conference when one girl pulled her out of class to warn her.

“She said, ‘You can’t come to lunch tomorrow … because they’re going to have a peanut party with everything peanut they can find, to watch your face blow up,’” VanEssendelft recounted.

Apparently one of the reasons for this kind of bullying is that kids don’t understand how food can be dangerous to some people. So kids, not having enough myelination in their brains, decide to experiment on their classmates to see if, in fact, they will croak if exposed to the source of their food sensitivity. How charming.

There have been studies that link that lack of myelination with childhood aggression. The idea is that until the myelination process is complete, children lack the ability to properly understand risk and consequences. Which would also account for this mathematical equation: the number of kids in a car x increase in speed / lack of myelin = % of dead kids splatted on tree trunk.

There are numerous applications for this theory of myelin development. If teens aren’t mentally developed enough to understand that some people have food allergies and that exposure to those substances could be harmful or fatal, then can they

• safely be presented with a license to drive a 3,000 lb death machine at high speeds?
• be responsible enough to engage in sexual activity?
• make medical decisions for themselves without parental consent or counsel?

And is it acceptable that a child can threaten another child with bodily harm or death just because the weapon of choice is Jif?

…since the girls had never been in trouble before, the school wouldn’t punish them or search their lockers.

We could blame it on the vegetarians. Apparently the nutrients in meat, such as iron and iodine, are essential for the production of myelin.

Excuse the rant- I had one of those “What is this world coming to?” moments after reading this story.