A 20-year-old man has become an unsuspecting hero in the movement to end this ridiculous bullying epidemic. Last year, Russell Dickerson III filed a lawsuit against the Seattle school district he attended through junior and senior high school, claiming educators did close to nothing to stop the taunting he endured at the hands of fellow students. And for his suffering, he’s been awarded a $100,000 settlement.

I don’t think anybody can argue that his experience at the Aberdeen School District was heartbreaking. He was spit on. Kids smashed an egg on his head. They designed a website just to poke fun of his race, his weight, and his assumed homosexuality, even though Dickerson never said he was gay. His peers pinned racist notes to his backpack and posted a fake picture in the locker room of him kissing a man.

All of that in six years sounds more deserving of a $1 million payout, but $100,000 is a start.

My daughter used to come home from preschool every day with a report on her bully. "She didn't let us play with her today," I'd hear. She couldn't have made me feel more helpless if she'd tied my hands behind my back and shoved a dirty gym sock in my mouth. It's that memory of feeling like I was failing my kid that came straight to mind when I heard a dad was taking the controversial step of filing for a restraining order against his fourth grade son's bully.

Robert Casteel's methods are getting a lot of criticism today. After all, he went to court and convinced a judge that another kid should have to stay at least 20 feet away from his 10-year-old son. How you make that happen when two kids both go to school in the same building in the Jurupa Unified School District is anyone's guess.

We've all heard some inventive punishments for teenage miscreants over the years. Public shaming. Seriously unpleasant jobs. Turning their cellphone into a "phone home only" machine. But if you're looking for something that will really set your kid on the straight and narrow, have I got a good one for you!

A high school football player in Montana got an unusual sentence from a judge recently for an unsettling case of team hazing. The kid covered his teammates' mouths, told them not to struggle, then punched them in the groin and poked them through their pants. The players were warned if they struggled, the torture would be even more severe. So what did the judge do to the 15-year-old bully?

We expect bullies to target the weak and the small. That kind of cowardice is what makes them bullies in the first place, hence the classic refrain: "Why don't you pick on somebody your own size?" But bullies who go after kids with autism ... that's the lowest form of cowardice I can think of.

The Elkton Middle School student who viciously beat 11-year-old Kaleb Kula at his Maryland bus stop falls into this category. So do the kids who stood around cheering for Kula's attacker, yelling things like "Yo, beat the sh**t out of him!" Disgusting.

What they did next, however, was just plain stupid.

"You're so gay!" "Retard!" "Spaz!" Those are some of the slurs your kids may be hearing on the playground, or so says a report released this week titled "Playground and Prejudice: Elementary School Climate in the United States."  Released by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, it paints a scary picture of what most children face in schools.

It states that a shocking 75 percent of elementary students say they're bullied and called names regularly. Also, almost half of the elementary school teachers say they think bullying, name-calling or harassment is a “very serious or somewhat serious problem at their school.” 

Are kids today really that mean?

It's a fact that fills me with nothing but relief: most 13-year-old girls in America have yet to have sex. So I suppose I should be surprised that a spot-on take-down of the practice of slut-shaming females who engage in sex comes from none other than a 13-year-old female vlogger. But I'm not.

It may sound like an adult topic, but the first time I ever heard the word slut was in high school. The person using it hadn't had sex yet ... nor had the person it was being used against. And now that the video made last August by Sarah McLeod, a YouTube user who goes by the name Astorice, has gone viral, the whole world is getting a look inside a typical high school.

There are so many examples of hatred, bigotry, and just plain idiocy in the world every day. The only thing more outrageous than knowing these people live and walk amongst us, is the fact that they're raising children. Many of those children seem doomed to be indoctrinated  and carry on with the same small-minded, hate-filled ways as their parents, but they don't always. A tale of two brothers in a video store illustrates beautifully how children can and do become better than their parents.

The story came from Kristen Wolfe, who blogs at Up and Down We Go, and was highlighted on Huffington Post. The 20-year-old student works at a Gamestop store in North Carolina, and she wrote a post about what she saw while working one day titled "Dear Customer Who stuck Up for His Little Brother."

When a child commits suicide after years of bullying, it's hard not to want to crawl back into bed, pull the covers over your head, and refuse to come out. That's how I want to look at the sad story of Amanda Cummings, the 15-year-old girl from Staten Island, New York, who threw herself in front of a bus two days after Christmas. But I can't. Because buried in among the heart wrenching details of Cummings' last weeks and days on earth could be one of the secrets to stemming this tide of young deaths.