CHRONIC CONDITION

Guest column by Dave Baal Evans, Georgia

What if I told you there is a hidden epidemic harming 1 in 3 school age children with the potential to:

• result in physical injuries

• cause lifelong psychological damage to their confidence, sense of self-worth, and personal dignity

• rob their childhood of innocence

• emotionally scar them for life

• lead to depression, drug use, and in extreme cases, suicide

What would you be willing to do to put an end to this pandemic?

What I am talking about is not a new disease, a dangerous new fad, or a new designer drug being smuggled in to our country. It is a very old problem that is often dismissed as a minor part of growing up for a very small minority of children. What is it?

Please see CHRONIC page 10

Taking action, curiously enough, is one of the strangest things about bullying: people quite often do absolutely nothing. It matters not if the setting is a schoolyard, a busy city street, or the offices of a Fortune 500 corporation. As illustrated by the photo on page 3, people frequently just watch from the sidelines. They do not get involved. They do not intervene. Their only physical response may be to take out their cell phone and start recording video. Not to forward to law enforcement, school officials or HR. No, just to share on social media.

Does it matter? Does intervention somehow short-circuit a child’s ability to defend him- or herself, leading to lifelong weakness? After all, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

Not every old proverb is true, and the time-worn sticks-and-stones adage is one of the worst. It is a lie, pure and simple, as many victims of strictly verbal bullying can attest to years later.

Bullying can take many forms.

One definition states, “Bullying is a conscious, willful, deliberate, repeated and hostile activity marked by an imbalance of power, intent to harm, and/ or the threat of aggression.” It can be perpetrated by a single individual or a large group. Sometimes the group does nothing more than cheer on a lone bully, laughing at and jeering the victim while deliberately or inadvertently providing “moral” support to the bully.

The fact that bullying is by definition a form of abuse that takes place over a long period of time and involves preying on a victim viewed for whatever reason as weak adds

Please see BULLIES page 3