I watched a video today which sent shivers down my spine and broke my heart.
A 15-year-old girl in Canada posted up a video describing some of her experiences with bullying and has recently been found dead.
It's scary that just a few unwise decisions and isolated actions on her part resulted in such an extent of bullying and being taken advantage of. Not that I condone what she did but it did not warrant even a fragment of the treatment she received.
It's scary that the connectivity of the Internet and of social platforms such as Facebook can be used for so much good, and at the same time, be the catalyst for something so horrific.
It's scary how cruel the new generation can be. I mean, I've been bullied in school in the past, physically and verbally, but when kids can hide behind a computer screen or even an alter-identify online, they can truly get carried away in how malicious and vicious they can be.
And most of all, it scares me that I have to raise my daughter (and future kids) in this world where the rules of the game have radically changed, not least by the technological progress.
I have no doubt that the peer pressures that my child will face will be many times more than what I went through. And similarly, the social pressures I faced were also more than my parents' generation who were more concerned about survival than fitting in.
But a case like this should never have happened. Amanda Todd should be alive today. And there's no easy answer to how to prevent it - the responsibility lies with all of us; not just the teachers who enforce anti-bullying in the school compund, not just the parents who raise their kids in this connected world, not just the strangers who see the bullying happening online and have a choice whether to step in to do something or not...
I can only hope that if any of my children ever make these kind of mistakes, they can trust me enough to open up to me and then we try to work out a solution together, following through all the way.
My prayers are with Amanda's family.
0 comments:
Post a Comment