After a particularly bad day, perhaps when he was spit on or pushed into his locker or had girls as well as boys call him faggot or queer or homo, Azmi Jubran would head straight to his bedroom after school and attempt to suffocate himself.
"I would hold a pillow over my face for as long as I could," he recalls. "All I really did was learn to hold my breath for a long time."
He smiles and shakes his head.
"But I did think about death a lot and how it might be a lot less painful than what I was going through."
Mr. Jubran, 24, is sitting in a restaurant at a Vancouver hotel, working on a stack of pancakes and talking about the nightmare that won't go away. On May 30, lawyers acting on behalf of the North Vancouver School District will file papers with the Supreme Court of Canada, appealing an April decision by the B.C. Court of Appeal that found Mr. Jubran suffered discrimination based on sexual orientation even though he isn't gay.
Mr. Jubran first filed a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal back in 1996, when he was a Grade 10 student at Handsworth Secondary School. In part, because of a huge backlog of cases, it would take six years before the tribunal found that the North Vancouver school board didn't do enough to protect him from the discriminatory taunts and physical abuse he was receiving. The tribunal ordered the board to pay him $4,500 for injury to his dignity and self-respect as well as cover his court costs.
However, the board appealed the decision to the B.C. Supreme Court. It overturned the tribunal's decision, saying Mr. Jubran couldn't have suffered discrimination based on sexual orientation because he wasn't gay and because there was no proof those taunting him believed he was gay.
In overturning that decision, the appeal court ruled it was the effect of the actions, not the intent or belief of those responsible for then, that was the basis for determining whether discrimination had occurred.
This week, the North Vancouver school board referred questions about the planned appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada to its lawyers. The board's lawyers said they could confirm only that they planned to appeal -- and that was it.
For his part, Mr. Jubran, who now works in the catering-service branch of a Vancouver hotel, is surprised the case is still alive. If it helps to focus attention on the issue of bullying in schools, that's fine, he says. Yet, part of him wonders why the board would fight the matter, forcing it to the top court in the land.
"It started in my first year of high school," he says. "Up until then, all through elementary school, things were fine. But in Grade 8 that's when it started -- and never stopped."
Mr. Jubran isn't sure why he became a target for the homophobic harassment he would endure for five years. He didn't dress or speak differently than other kids. He wasn't into sports, and he wasn't alone in that regard. But one day someone called him "homo" and it began.
"I would tell them I wasn't gay, but it didn't matter. Maybe it was because of the reaction calling me gay, or whatever, provoked; that's why they kept doing it. But those names bothered me more than anything."
At first it was just a couple of kids. Then four or five. Then a dozen -- boys and girls. By Grade 12, Mr. Jubran estimates there might have been up to 80 kids who, at one time or another, participated in the harassment.
Besides being called names, Mr. Jubran had a shirt set on fire during one class. In woodworking, students would fire chunks of wood or heavy metal bolts at him. In another class, a kid rolled up a piece of paper into a tight ball and fired it at him using an elastic band. It hit him directly in the cornea, temporarily blinding him.
During a mandatory overnight camping trip, Mr. Jubran listened as kids talked about dipping him in acid. Later that night he listened as the same students urinated on his tent. During gym class once, he had just finished a long run with his classmates and was hunched over, his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath when a girl came up from behind and kicked him as hard as she could.
"It knocked the wind out of me and I fell to the ground. Everyone was laughing."
Another time in music class the teacher left the room and as soon as he did, a chorus sprung up: "Azmi is gay, Azmi is gay."
For the first year of high school, Mr. Jubran didn't tell his parents. He believed his tormentors when they told him: "You're dead if you mention this to anyone."
So he'd go home and watch television or play road hockey by himself. The friends he'd had in elementary school abandoned him. One day in Grade 11, Mr. Jubran was walking down the street with his mother, Jacklin, when a car full of kids drove by.
"Hey, Azmi," someone shouted. "You motherfucking faggot."
Jacklin Jubran was scared and angry and for the first time understood what her son was going through.
Mr. Jubran says his parents urged him to change schools many times, but he insisted on staying. Looking back, he thinks he might have killed himself if he'd left, because what little self-esteem he still had would have been gone. He ended up barely graduating from Handsworth; the straight As he'd always got in elementary school disappeared as soon as the tormenting began. It was all Cs and Ds after that.
He often had trouble sleeping. He had nightmares about kids chasing him with a gun. In real life, he was forced to flee classmates throwing firecrackers at him.
"I was supposed to be learning. Most of the time I'd come home from school and just want to sleep I'd be so exhausted from the experience."
Mr. Jubran believes neither the teachers nor the administration at Handsworth did enough to address the abuse he received.
"This whole thing is like a scar. It's going to be with me the rest of my life. What I'd love to do is use my experience to make sure others don't have to suffer the way I did."
Gary Mason