Following the suicide of his son Ryan, a victim of bullying, John Halligan travels the country, giving talks about bullying, depression and suicide to students and parents. Halligan made a stop at the Pearl Miller High School on Wednesday night to share his experience.

Earlier in the day, Halligan spent some time talking to the school's students about the harm in bullying. Halligan returned to PRM that evening to speak to the parents.

“Tonight’s presentation is very different from what your kids saw this afternoon,” Halligan said. “And by the way, they were great.”

Halligan explained that his student presentation tells the story of his son Ryan’s life in detail through pictures and video clips and his own personal account. In his parent presentation, “I’m going to give you information I wish my wife and I had had before our son passed away,” he said.

He showed a brief television clip from one of the many programs Ryan’s story has been featured on to give the audience some context of his son’s life. He then showed a PowerPoint presentation of things he wished he had done and what the parents in the room could do.

Halligan explained that Ryan’s suicide was likely a result of bullying in school, a rumor spread by one person that he was gay, and a girl pretending she liked him only to reject him in front of her friends. The television program also said that Ryan had undiagnosed depression.

Halligan admitted he made mistakes in handling Ryan’s bullying. He began with a list of what he wished he had done differently.

“I made the mistake of relating my son’s experience to mine,” he said. When Ryan had a meltdown in seventh grade because of the bullying, Halligan taught his son to fight back physically.

“It’s different today. They’re going at each other emotionally way more than they are physically,” he said.

He also talked about having a “back-up” adult, someone the child felt comfortable going to when they were too embarrassed to talk to their parents.

Krys Cohen, a mother of a kindergartener in Kinnelon, hopes to be one of those adults.

“A lot of the girls babysit for me now and I keep hearing about the horrible, horrible things they’re doing to each other,” she said.

She came to the presentation to learn how to prepare and talk to the girls she employs.

Halligan said his son had begged him not to go to the school, and he had respected that decision.

“After his death, we were second-guessing every decision we’d made,” Halligan said.

Halligan sat down with the school’s principal and counselor and discovered his son’s school focused on conflict resolution to solve bullying problems. Bullying is not about a conflict, Halligan asserted, but about power.

The most important group to target when dealing with a bullying situation are the bystanders, Halligan said. Bullies typically bully to get a reaction not only out of the victim but out of the people around them.

“You gotta go after the audience,” Halligan said.

Halligan said he wished one of the girl’s friends, or the bully’s friends, had told them it was not funny to break someone’s heart or make fun of their sexuality.

“This could have been a very different story,” he said. “It’s called peer pressure, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

It is also important to target the bully’s privileges at the school and making him or her feel real consequences.

“I am not a fan of detention or suspension,” Halligan said. “I’ve yet to meet a kid who doesn’t like a day off from school.”

Instead, he recommends taking away privileges such as being on a sports team and making the bully pay back the bullied through community service, service to the family, or cleaning up his or her act in other ways.

“You have to give the kids a chance to clean up their own messes,” he said.

Halligan also talked about cyber-bullying, a term he finds problematic due to its “sensationalist” quality.

“This is not brand new,” Halligan said.

While Ryan was living at a time when instant messaging was a popular trend, social networking sites, such as Facebook and Formspring, have made cyber-bullying even more prominent, Halligan said.

Halligan strongly encouraged parents to talk to their kids about their online behavior, but also to limit the amount of time their kids are on the computer and to consider tracking software. Many parents are reluctant to do so, fearing their kids will think they are spying.

“We allow this privacy to occur, and frankly I don’t think it’s healthy,” Halligan said.

When Ryan was alive, the family had a “no secret passwords” rule that meant all of their accounts had to have the same password. Halligan promised his children he would not look except in case of an emergency. This allowed him to log into Ryan’s AOL Instant Messenger account after his death and talk to his friends about what went on, as well as read his IM logs. It allowed him to piece together the events in his son’s life, including the girl pretending to like him and a friend who encouraged him to commit suicide.

He also recommended that parents make it clear that they own the computer and that they will be monitoring it and reserve the right to take it away. He said parents should not give computers as a gift.

Karen Dunchus, mother of a ten-year-old and a freshman in high school, said that point hit home for her. Her daughter is on Facebook and received her computer as a gift.

“It’s so true how we trust the kids and there has to be some mistrust,” she said. “So I’m going home right now and I am going to talk to my husband and we will talk to our kids. It’s important to get everything out in the open.”

Halligan also turned to the law in the wake of his son’s death. Vermont had a very weak bullying prevention law at the time. Only seven months after Ryan’s death, Halligan had helped pressure the state to sign a much tougher bullying prevention law. He then went on to help pass Vermont’s Suicide Prevention Law, which mandated that schools teach signs of depression and suicidal tendencies in schools and instruct students on how to get help for them or a friend.

Halligan said he started work on that after a friend of Ryan’s told him he had stayed up with Ryan every night attempting to keep him from committing suicide that night.

“This kid thought it was his job to be my kid’s counselor,” Halligan said.

Though some parents thought talking about suicide would put the idea in their kids’ heads, Halligan showed a chart that showed rates of depression and suicide had actually gone down in Vermont since the law was passed.

At Halligan’s recommendation, Cohen said she may talk to her babysitters’ parents about cutting them off from such harmful websites as Facebook and Formspring.

Halligan said cutting students off from these online resources may make them mad at first, but often the child will be relieved.

“You may be surprised at how kids react to rules,” he said.

Bernadine Ferrari, who is on the Home and School Association of Kinnelon, said the association has been trying to get Halligan to come speak for years.  She said it was very important in today’s times.

“In the news, there’s always a new case coming up with bullying, cyber-bullying, etc., and the kids and parents are aware of it,” she said.

Ferrari said she also learned from Halligan’s experience.

“As a parent, you think you know a lot, but I learned quite a bit, and of course there’s always something new,” she said. “This helps us keep up.”

Dunchus said she thanked Halligan personally after the program.

“It was wonderful,” Dunchus said. “It came from the depth of his whole person.”