Wednesday, June 12, 2013

If you can't be nice..........

It's taken me awhile to get back to my blog. I've got lots of drafts saved but, you know how it is, I've been busy.

But today one of the kids at school was bullied and it made me so angry, mystified, frustrated, saddened, bewildered that I had to write.....something.

Kids sometimes get bullied at school so this incident wasn't all that unusual. Some schools will tell you they don't have a bullying issue but they're lying. I think bullying behaviour on some level is a part of everyone's learning curve and a lot of my day is spent following up the real, the perceived and the imagined hurts that kids inflict on each other. Usually it works out well and everyone learns from their mistakes and kids become better at being kind to each other as they grow up.

Today's issue though was with big kids, mean girls who should know better. It was a cyber incident, an online, nasty comment. Not defamatory or illegal, just mean. Mean enough that 4 different people sent me a screen shot of it (This is a good thing because it means other kids are looking out for each other and for someone to 'fix' this sort of behaviour). Online bullying is hard to follow up because of the fine line that exists about what is and isn't school business. Nevertheless, I will follow this one up and likely I'll be accused of not minding my own business etc etc etc. No mind, I'm a big girl and I get paid to make sure everyone feels safe in my school.

However, what really led to my overwhelming frustration was that when I got home I read several different versions of this post  about a political party menu with a totally disrespectful 'joke' about our Prime Minister. Every political affiliation and debate over misogyny aside, it's not ok to say this about another person. Worse still, while some of the comments on the sites that published this news were in agreement with me, many were not. "Just a joke', 'harden up', 'the Labor Party do it too', appeared frequently. You know what, it's not a joke to make derogatory comments about anyone's breasts. Payback doesn't make a wrong thing right. The office of Prime Minister is occupied by a person and all people deserve respect.

No wonder my mean girls thought it was ok to bully one of their own :-(