Dear mother, your little one comes home from school with a split lip and dried blood crusted on his lower lip. When you ask him what happened, he whimpers, “I fell, mummy,” his eyes barely leaving his toes. You’re not convinced, but you decide to take his word for it. After all, it’s the class teacher’s fault if she wasn’t paying attention to your little boy. You should call her and give her a piece of your mind.
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But then, weeks go by with more strange occurrences: missing beverages, an empty food flask, and a constantly hungry eight-year-old. So, one morning, you drop by his school unannounced, claiming that he left his homework at home. You discover that his food flask is empty even hours before lunchtime and that the extra snacks and yogurt you packed have disappeared. When you look into his tender eyes, all you see is raw fear. His growling stomach confuses you even further.
Then you remember those gloomy nights when his piercing screams of “Please! Don’t hit me, I’ll give it to you!” jolted you awake. Now you know what’s been going on. Your precious child has become a victim of bullying; a nightmare that now haunts him every time he closes his eyes.
This catastrophic social menace called bullying has bitten hard into the lives of several young ones, many of whom grow up to become bullies themselves. A study from PubMed, conducted among 621 in-school Nigerian adolescents, shows that 51.1 percent of them had experienced at least one type of bullying, while 27.9 percent reported themselves as bullies, the most common being physical bullying.
This epidemic has deteriorated so much that it has become highly terminal, spreading its poisonous fingers across the minds of young people from different races.
From the case of the 12-year-old boy who was bullied and forced to take drugs by other young boys in his school, which resulted in his death, to the case of the fast-rising musician whose supposed music buddies stalked and harassed him until the day of his death, to the case of two Nigerian youths who bullied a foreign teenager into sending his nudes and then blackmailed him into parting with his money and taking his own life, the toll of casualties has risen exponentially.
Gone are the days when bullying was considered a minor nuisance. Now, hearts race when a child is said to have become a victim of bullying in school. Young boys and girls no longer just rob the weaker kids of their beverages and food items. Now, even an unsuspecting naive person looking at their phone screen can be bullied by someone from a faraway countries into parting with their money, prized possessions, and even their lives!
But where does this disease start and how do we go about finding a cure for it? The first vaccine that comes to mind is the molding of young minds when they are still malleable and easy to bend. As the saying goes, “It’s easier to train a child than to repair an adult.” This starts with regulating what our young ones watch on TV. You’d be surprised at how much violence and aggression are present in some of the cartoons that kids watch.
Another important thing is to pay attention to the company these kids keep and to monitor them closely for even the smallest signs of aggression. Education and reinforcement should be the prevailing operating systems that control our kids’ actions in the long run. We should never get tired of instilling in them the right mindsets and values.
Once we have done all of these, we should commit them to God, their Creator, and overwhelm them with love. Hopefully, if we can nip the disease in the bud, we can stop it from infecting the fruits and spreading to the entire forest.
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