Richmond moms and dads, teachers and school officials: Please take a moment and watch this movie trailer. Really, it is a matter of life and death. Your child’s health and future may depend on it.
Sounds dramatic? Consider this: Over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year, making it the most common form of violence experienced by young people in the nation.*
The trailer is for Bully, a new documentary that is generating buzz for its unfiltered and painful storytelling of a common problem in schools across the nation – childhood bullying. The film follows bullied children and their families as they try to work with the system to improve their children’s lives. For some families, their campaign honors a child they lost, driven to an early death by relentless abuse from their peers. These brave families hope to save others from the pain of losing a child to this preventable epidemic. And they hope to save the children whose voices aren’t being heard.
This film will be hard to watch. Your heart will ache for the parents who have to bury their little boy. You will want to scream when you watch a child being beaten up on their own bus. You will want to scream again when you watch a school official deny the problem even exists.
Bully will surely ruffle some feathers after its release. The film exposes some uncomfortable truths – truths that might not exist everywhere, but certainly do exist often enough that they need to be addressed. The truth that some school officials can be oblivious, or worse, insensitive to the realities of bullying. That some parents aren’t doing enough to raise empathetic, fair-minded children, or worse, are modeling bullying behaviors themselves.
Of course all of us can agree that bullying must be stopped, but some school officials may not want to admit they are letting their students down by allowing abusive behaviors to continue in their classrooms or on their buses. And some parents may not want to admit that it’s their children who are doing the bullying. But we owe it to our children, and to the families who have lost their precious children, to discuss this issue completely, identify the breakdowns in our systems, and find a solution.
Set to be released on March 30th, Bully currently has an R-rated MPAA rating, which requires minors to be accompanied by an adult. Some activists are campaigning to have the rating changed to PG-13 to make the movie more accessible to kids and teens, but the MPAA appears to be standing firm on its decision because of the movie’s strong language. Regardless of the rating, families need to see this film. And perhaps that R-rating will prompt more parents to watch this film with their children, to gauge their reaction and use it as a springboard to start a dialogue about how to spot, put a stop to, and prevent bullying.
If not your child, someone’s child is being bullied right now. Abused and tortured on a daily basis at the one place that is supposed to nurture and develop their young minds and bodies. Being made to feel shameful or less than or even physically assaulted because of their looks, their socio-economic status, their disability, their sexual preference, their choice of clothing that day… Isn’t that reason enough to start the discussion about how we can put an end to childhood bullying?
*Source: The Bully Project
