Bully

My brother suggested I watch a documentary titled Bully.  “You’ll blog about it”, he said.  So here I am, proving my brother right. A few decades ago that would have been unthinkable!  

I didn’t even realize that this was the week the federal government was unveiling its new anti-bullying strategy. It will be headed by the Red Cross which will train thousands of teens to present anti-bullying workshops for their peers. The father of 15-year old Jamie Hubley applauds the move. Jamie was an openly gay boy who was constantly bullied and killed himself in 2011.  Heritage Minister James Moore put it best: If we do nothing it will lead to the death of children. Adults often forget that whatever is happening in the moment seems like it’s eternal for kids. They need to hear from peers more than authority figures.

The film, Bully, follows five families whose kids are being bullied or have literally been bullied to death. It’s not as clear when it comes to the kids we only meet posthumously but the bullied kids are all somehow different in a culture, meaning high school, where conforming is the rule of law. One boy was born very prematurely and now at age 13 he’s gangly and nerdy and doesn’t have a good sense of social norms, probably because he’s never had a friend. He’s also a very responsible big brother to a brood of kids, a good student and an optimistic little soul. Another girl’s difference is simply being a lesbian in a small town in the rural south where time hasn’t advanced past 1955, apparently. Not only is she persecuted by students and teachers, her parents have been ostracized by their peers. People they used to socialize with won’t even lift a hand to wave to them now.  But the girl is determined to stick it out and endure the assaults in an attempt to change things.

Bully lets us into the lives of these kids and shows what it’s really like to be the target of unfair, unwarranted and relentless attacks. We see bullies in action and the feeble attempts by school administrators to intervene in situations where they seemingly have little or no will to really impose any punishments or changes. In one particularly heartbreaking scene a Vice-Principal admonishes a boy for not wanting to shake the hand of the bully who makes his life a living hell. I longed for the development of Slap-O-Vision – technology that would allow you to reach into your TV screen and slap someone who needed it. Not just the bully, the Vice-Principal as well.  If you know anything about film-making, you’ll know that the VP had to sign a consent form in order to appear and that makes the incident so much worse. If she had been embarrassed or felt she was depicted poorly she wouldn’t have agreed to be shown. Therefore she really thought she was doing the right thing and she really, really wasn’t.

This documentary was made by a filmmaker who was bullied as a kid.  I was bullied as a kid as I’ve written here before and the person who was supposed to be my savior, my teacher, turned a blind eye and even joined in a couple of times. It was my parents who intervened and made it stop. And that’s who emerge as the real heroes of Bully.  The Mom who previously believed being homosexual was an unforgivable sin until “it became personal”.  The Dad who organized town meetings to get people talking about the issue so his son wouldn’t have died in vain.  Another Dad who had never been on the Internet before but started a Facebook group and a national movement called Stand for the Silent that has taken off like a wildfire.  (When I joined the Facebook group there were 97,000 members.) And that’s the point of the film, to get people talking and working on eradicating this issue. As part of the movie’s release, the filmmakers created The Bully Project. It has several components all aimed at taking a stand against bullying.  It means parents telling their kids to speak up when they see someone being mistreated and to be a friend to the new kid at school. Simply put, to make it uncool to be a bully. It has to filter down from the adults to the kids and really take hold and The Bully Project, and the Red Cross mentors announced this week, is a heck of a good start.  Visit the website HERE.