Bully-Free Charlotte

WHAT IS BULLY-FREE CHARLOTTE?
Bully-Free Charlotte is a new initiative of the CCSJ and is designed to address what is recognized locally and nationally to be a growing problem.  Bully Free Charlotte is based on the premise that “it takes a village to raise a child” and it is intended to rally the Charlotte community to address the serious issue of bias-based bullying among young people.  It also works on the principle that in the process of mobilizing and organizing adult care-givers and role models to help young people to be more accepting and inclusive among their networks, everyone will engage in attitudinal and behavioral change that will make our whole community more inclusive.

Bully-Free Charlotte will focus on parents, guardians, extended family members, teachers, mentors, coaches, youth leaders, faith leaders, civic leaders and any and all adults who influence the attitudes and behaviors of our young people.  It will provide them with resources and training to help them identify and address bullying among the youth.  It will create the conditions among the adult networks – in neighborhoods, faith groups, soccer leagues, PTAs and so on – for an examination of societal, professional, family and personal attitudes and values in relation to difference.  This examination will help all adults involved understand the ways in which we are ‘teaching’ our young people to be either inclusive or exclusive of others who do not fit the dominant norms.  It will make us think about the remarks we make while watching TV or at a sporting event or in response to an incident at work.  Because however much young people might try to give the impression that they pay no attention to what adults say, they do – they take many of their cues from adults.

WHAT THE YOUTH TELL US
So many young people who come to CCSJ programs and activities come with stories of being excluded, harassed, picked on, assaulted, ridiculed and tormented. They dread going to school, or soccer practice, or just out in their neighborhood because they have become a target based on their race, gender, ability status, sexual orientation, immigration status, financial situation and so on.  Horrible, humiliating things are said and done to them because they do not conform to the dominant norm or because they belong to a group that is negatively targeted and stereotyped in our society.  For many victims, truancy and dropping out are often the result of and the solution to being bullied in school.

WHAT THE DATA TELL US
The 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a national survey sponsored by the CDC, shows bullying and harassment  among young people to be a rising trend, so much so that rather than subsume the information under “Psychological Health” as in previous years, a separate section for the data has been created in the 2007 survey results. The YRBS results for Charlotte-Mecklenburg are on the CMS website and show 40% of students in our high schools and 53% in our middle schools “strongly agree that bullying and harassment by other students is a problem at their school”. For high school students, this number is up from 28% from 2005 (2005 data not reported for middle schools). There is a pressing need to create a more inclusive and safe environment in our schools.  Our own anecdotal evidence confirms the findings of the 2007 GLSEN survey that 40% of the NC students surveyed feel unsafe in their school because of some aspect of their identity (eg. race, gender, sexual orientation) or because of some physical characteristic.  The GLSEN survey, “From Teasing to Torment“, states that students at NC schools are 33% more likely than those nationwide to say that school bullying is a problem. The website of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence cites numerous reports detailing the causes and consequences of school violence.  The evidence shows that bullying around race, gender and sexual orientation is prevalent in NC schools, and that students who are bullied are anywhere from 4 – 8 times more likely than their peers to suffer from depression and to be suicidal than their peers who are not victims of bullying. Bullying affects attendance, performance, retention and graduation-rates.

GET INVOLVED
There is a notion among many adults that bullying is just something that happens to everyone and you just have to ignore it or toughen up and fight back. Yet many adults, if they could be honest about their own experiences, would recognize that bullying stunts the development of the victim in so many ways and creates a feeling of insecurity for both victim and bystander. Many of us can remember the dread of seeing our tormentor/s or of witnessing the attack on a school-mate and not knowing what to do.  Bullying just creates a bad situation all the way around.  Through Bully-Free Charlotte, and with your help, CCSJ will spawn a whole series of community-wide initiatives on diversity and inclusion that will make us all more understanding, accepting and respectful. Please go to the “Contact Us” page and sign up to get involved in making Charlotte a bully-free zone!