The victim
From November 17 to the 23rd, it’s bullying awareness week in Canada. For every one who are no longer school students it’s easy to treat bullying awareness week like national nutrition week and ignore it all together. But unfortunately, if you google “bully” “Canada” and “suicide” you could get more hits than if you look for “naked celebrities”. You will not find just one or two horror stories; you will find hundreds and hundreds of them. The more we read about these stories the more we realise that the greatest thing about being an adult is that no matter how bad things get, we do not need to go through grade 8 ever again. For many of our students, going to school does not rank up as the best thing in their lives. Just because they are different, they look at it like some sort of prison sentence. We tend to forget how awful it can be for those students. As teahcers, we are feeling helpless and often don’t know how to respond to the bullying. We just want to tell those students that even in the real prison, eventually, everyone gets parole.
You might think that as the amazing teacher you are, bullying does not take place in your classroom. You students are protected from it and have great relationships with eachother. Well, you might want to rethink twice about this. There are some scary scanadian statistics out there that would convince anyone that it's time to react.
Did you know that in Canada:
- 31% of students say they would participate in the bullying of a young dislikes.
- 11% of secondary students bully other youngsters at least once a year.
- Bullying occurs once every 7 minutes on the playground and once every 25 minutes in the classroom
- 25% of children in grades 4 to 6 have been bullied
Canada also has the 9th highest rate of bullying in the 13-years-olds category on a scale of 35 countries
But there is hope:
In the majority of cases, bullying stops within 10 seconds when peers intervene, or do not support the bullying behaviour.