Today is World Bullying Prevention Day.\u00a0 This is a topic that is very close to my heart.<\/p>\n
I was bullied quite a bit in school.\u00a0 It started in late elementary and continued through graduation.\u00a0 It took different forms over the years but the message was always the same- I was weird, I was ugly, I wasn’t “cool”.\u00a0 I was bullied because I was smart- on one occasion I was threatened with bodily harm if I didn’t “throw” a test.\u00a0 For the record I didn’t, and had no intention of doing it, but I was so nervous and scared that I wound up scoring lower than I should have anyway.<\/p>\n
This day of bullying prevention was started in 2007 by 2 high school boys named David Shepard and Travis Price. They noticed a fellow student getting teased for wearing a pink shirt the first day of school.\u00a0 They went out that night and purchased 50 pink shirts and distributed them the next day and it took off from there.\u00a0 By 2009 it was already being observed in multiple countries and it was declared World Day of Bullying Prevention by the United Nations in 2012.<\/p>\n
What is the best way to prevent bullying?\u00a0 The jury is still out on that.\u00a0 However, I believe that education is the best tool we currently have.\u00a0 If you have kids, please talk to them.\u00a0 It’s not just “kids being kids”.\u00a0 It’s real and it hurts.\u00a0 It hurt me.<\/p>\n
I do want to report that quite a few of the people who were involved with the bullying have, as adults, apologized to me for their actions.\u00a0 And I certainly do appreciate that.\u00a0 I truly believe that anyone can change if they really want to, and I also believe that peer pressure was why some of them participated in the first place.<\/p>\n
So there is hope.\u00a0 But we all need to take it seriously.\u00a0 Not just today, but every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is World Bullying Prevention Day.\u00a0 This is a topic that is very close to my heart. I was bullied quite a bit in school.\u00a0 It started in late elementary and continued through graduation.\u00a0 It took different forms over the years but the message was always the same- I was weird, I was ugly, I wasn’t “cool”.\u00a0 I was bullied… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[23,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issues","category-myself"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/sad-child.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}