Kristian is a student at Walford and North Shropshire College in England but earns money as a Taylor Swift impersonator -- a fact that her classmates recently discovered.

"Some girls at college had started making nasty comments, but it escalated really quickly," she told the Daily Mail. "'The girl came up behind me and dragged me off my chair by my pony tail, then started kicking me in the face."

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O'Keefe's petition urges the retailer to expand its sizes, citing how his own struggle with body image and an eating disorder was exacerbated by Abercrombie's limited sizes: "As a young adult who suffered from an eating disorder through much of middle and high school, I remember looking at the ads for Abercrombie & Fitch and combing the racks and not seeing anything that fit me,” wrote O’Keefe. “As silly as it seems, it made me feel worthless to not be able to wear the ‘it’ styling that everyone else was wearing.”

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Using mean, aggressive measures to get your way over a bullying bill? Anyone else feel an Alanis Morissette verse coming on?

After Aaberg's death -- just one of many high-profile 2010 LGBT suicides that made bullying a national issue -- Sen. Al Franken made a strong push for tougher, clearer legislation to protect students. "No student should have to dread going to school because they fear being bullied," he said. "It’s clear that we need to do more to ensure schools are a safe environment for all students. Ending this bullying and harassment in schools will be a priority for education reform in the next Congress."

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In the U.K. on Sunday, Nigel Evans, a senior conservative member of Parliament, found himself responding to accusations of rape and assault -- and declaring them "completely false." His two accusers are both male.

The British media says the claims against him go back as far as 2009 and as recently as this past March. The 55-year-old Evans has not been charged with any crime, and though he will not be chairing House of Commons debates this week, he has vowed he will not step down. He was interrogated over the weekend, and police searched his car and home. Though the accusers, said to both be in their 20s, have not been named, Evans says that the claims have been made by "two people who are well known to each other and until Saturday, I regarded as friends ... I cannot understand why they have been made, especially as I have continued to socialize with one as recently as last week."

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From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

The bill passed the House 82-7 and the Senate 29-6. Only a majority vote in both chambers is required to have the bill become law over Beshear’s veto.

In a news release, Beshear said he had “significant concerns” that the bill would “cause serious unintentional consequences that could threaten public safety, health care and individuals’ civil rights.”

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Peterson's mother, Harriet McNeill, told the New York Daily News that her attorney would file initial paperwork later this week to hold the city accountable for the broken collarbone her daughter suffered in the fall. “I’ve been telling the school that one of these kids is going to kill my daughter -- and on Friday it almost came true,” she said.

Education officials said that they are putting the boy who attacked Peterson on another route. Both students attend the Brooklyn Children's Center, a private school for students with emotional, behavioral and other health problems.

According to McNeill's attorney, the boy involved in the incident has a history of violent behavior. In addition to the driver, there was a bus monitor present during the incident. Neither face disciplinary action, according to city officials.

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The researchers showed 1,183 readers a fictitious technology story, then had them read the equally fictitious comments. Though both groups' comments featured equal measures of criticism, skepticism and enthusiasm for the piece, one group's was "civil" while the other's was "rude" – peppered with cursing and epithets. And as the results showed, "Those exposed to rude comments … ended up with a much more polarized understanding … Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought." In other words, the "this sucks" chorus becomes the voice in a reader's own head.

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The move sparked national outrage, and now officials at the high school are trying to distance themselves from those planning the gay-free fête.

In an interview with local NBC affiliate WTWO, principal David Springer made clear that the "traditional" prom committee was an independent group and that the school had no involvement. He also said that all students will be welcome at the official prom in the Spring: "Anybody can go to the prom... Of course, a girl could go out with another girl if they didn't have a date or that was their choice."

The church that hosted the anti-gay prom organizers has also come under fire for their involvement: "Our church has no involvement in this whatsoever. It's a community thing where people have met here," Pastor Dale Wise at Sullivan First Christian Church told Indiana's WTHR.

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But how much better? That's a little more complicated.

Researchers analyzed data collected from 4,135 teens and young adults in England over seven years and found that more than half of those who self-identified as gay reported being bullied at the beginning of the study, with 57 percent of girls and 52 percent of boys reporting being harassed. But that number dropped to 9 percent for gay and bisexual boys and 6 percent for lesbian and bisexual girls by the study's end in 2010.

These numbers are a clear indicator that peer harassment lessens over time -- and that's really good news -- but the study also reveals that things are far from perfect after high school, particularly for gay males. Researchers found that gay men were still bullied four times as often as heterosexual males well into adulthood.

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After the Baltimore Ravens' Brendon Ayanbadejo came out as an advocate for gay rights, and the 49ers' Chris Culliver said he would never play with a gay teammate, it became clear that the Ravens vs. 49ers matchup on Super Bowl Sunday had brought to football some of the debate that had swirled for years around the corporate world and the military. The 49ers' video, intended, like all "It Gets Better" videos, to inspire bullied gay teens, was treated as though it had never happened by linebacker Ahmad Brooks and nose tackle Isaac Sopoaga, indicating that even some purported allies are not interested in the debate at all.

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That's a question musician Amanda Palmer, in her typically candid, crowd-sourcing way, got at in a blog post over the weekend, with revelatory results. In her post, she admits that while "ego surfing" for stories about herself one night, she found a different Amanda in her Google search. She hadn't heard of Amanda Todd before. She didn't know about the teenage girl who'd become a viral star for making a YouTube video about her struggles with "bullying, suicide, self harm." She didn't know that a month later, she committed suicide.

As Palmer notes, she shares more with Todd than just a first name. Both of them had been inspired by Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to tell their stories via a stream of note cards. And they both experienced the relentless viciousness of bullies.

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In September, the British Columbia teenager Todd posted a chronicle of "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm" on YouTube. In the nearly nine-minute video, Todd silently told, via handwritten notes, of first going on webcam as a seventh-grade student, and of the person who'd asked her to flash him. She did, and a year later, he found her on Facebook and demanded she "put on a show" or he'd send the topless photo of her to her friends and family. She refused, and he followed through on his threat, setting off a chain of grotesque events. As Todd battled depression and anxiety and drugs, she said the man created a Facebook page to broadcast the image. She changed schools and still endured "name calling" and being "judged," and friendlessness. "I can never get that photo back. It's out there forever," she wrote. She was teased and harassed, beaten up. She attempted suicide by drinking bleach. "Every day I think, why am I still here?" she wrote. Now, she isn't. Todd died last week, and a local school official told the Star she'd committed suicide. 

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Salon reached out to the man behind the campaign, Max Sidorov, Thursday for an interview; so far there has been no response. He did, however, tell the National Post that he was a victim of bullying as a child, and that "I really felt almost heartbroken to see that people would do such a thing to a nice lady. So, I just thought I had to do something about it."

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If you want to see everything you hate --  and then hate some more -- and then love about online culture, you can get it all in the tale of Karen Klein.

Klein is a bus monitor in the upstate New York town of Greece. As anyone who's ever been on one knows, school buses are a special circle of hell, with wheels. But when a video titled "Making the Bus Monitor Cry" emerged on YouTube this week, it was a particularly sickening display of schoolkid bullying. Over the course of 10 stomach-churning minutes, a group of students from Greece Athena Middle School verbally harass the 68-year-old Klein in a harrowing display of mob cruelty. It goes on and on and on, as the kids on Bus No. 784 call her a "troll," an "elephant" and a "fucking fatass" with "ugly-ass ears." When Klein tells them "Unless you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all," a boy responds, "Why don't you shut the fuck up?" When they goad her about the tears running down her face and she says, "I'm crying," one of them replies, "Yeah, you're probably missing your box of Twinkies." They poke and prod her, and at one point a kid says, "If I stabbed you in the stomach, my knife would go through you like butter." Appallingly, one of the boys told her that she's so ugly, her kids should commit suicide. What he didn't know was that Klein's son really did kill himself 10 years ago. And throughout it all, her tormenters just laugh and laugh at their own cruelty, egging each other on.

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When Judge Glenn Berman sentenced Dharun Ravi in a New Jersey courtroom earlier this month, he disgustedly told him, "I heard this jury say guilty 288 times. Twenty-four questions, 12 jurors, that's the multiplication. And I haven't heard you apologize once." In March, Ravi was convicted of bias and intimidation stemming from two incidents of secretly filming his Rutgers roommate Tyler Clementi "making out with a dude" -- and then boasting about it on Twitter. Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge shortly after.

The incident drew international attention and became a turning point in the anti-bullying movement. Yet throughout it all, Ravi remained conspicuously silent. Even as he faced the possibility of deportation and 10 years in jail, even when the judge called his behavior "offensive and unconscionable," he didn't offer a mea culpa. When Clementi's fellow victim in the webcam spying incident, the young man known to the court as "M.B.," issued a statement that Ravi "has never apologized to me for what he did and said," and that he does not "believe that he has taken responsibility for his conduct," Ravi still made no attempts at amends.

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When I arrived at this new private school in seventh grade, after my mom got a job teaching, I hoped Fred and I might be friends. We were both faculty brats, and the school catered to elite students from wealthy families.

But our similarities ended there. Fred was tall for an eighth grader, and he was clear-skinned and golden, with hair so light it seemed more than blond. I was short, stocky and pale. He wore clothing emblazoned with Hilfiger and Klein. I was perpetually clothed in hand-me-downs. People whispered that he smoked pot and felt up girls after school. I had changed schools so often I’d forgotten how to make friends.

Something about my incompetence made Fred furious. In the locker room after lacrosse, he would snap at my ankles with his stick until they turned bright red. One day during practice, he dropped any pretense of chasing after the grounded ball and simply rammed into me with all his force. My helmet disappeared; my sweaty gloves flopped on the ground.

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“We should direct all highway traffic into the school parking lot!” somebody suggested.

“Let’s cover everything in Vaseline!” someone else said.

I played along, but I was having a tough time. Eight months before, my boyfriend Ben had been killed in a car accident. He’d been different from the other guys: almost preternaturally kind and, like me, overly intellectual. On the way to our junior prom, we’d sat in the limo discussing “The Great Gatsby.”

I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed -- a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

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