Tomaz participated in this year's Take a Stand program — an interactive annual forum for students to confront the issue of bullying head-on in a safe and supportive environment — and was surprised by what he learned about intention and perception when it comes to bully behavior.
The impact of Take a Stand was really positive for me because it made me realize that something that I thought might just be for fun and not offensive might hurt someone. It made me realize that you really need to be more conscious about what you’re saying, because in the heat of the moment you’re not always thinking about everything you’re saying. It’s really important for us to talk about bullying and hurting people because otherwise we wouldn’t know whether or not we were offending people. If an event like this doesn’t happen, this topic wouldn’t have come up — or it would have come up after it was too late and someone had gotten hurt.
In the first activity, we were given a scenario and had to identify as an Ally, Victim, Perpetrator, or Bystander. At the beginning of this activity I didn’t think the scenarios were that offensive but by the end I realized I was really wrong — that in these situations people were identifying as a victim and were being hurt by it.
I think EXPLO is better than most other places by far in terms of bullying. I haven’t seen anyone be mean to anyone else. I do think it’s hard to identify a bully, though. A bully does not wake up in the morning and say “Okay, let’s bully someone today.” They hurt other people because they are hurting about something. They need to express that they are angry or sad and they take it out on someone else. I think there are people who are hurting and express that hurt in a bad way. Through discussions like what we just had we can give people a space to talk about their feelings. With events like Take a Stand, people can realize they are doing something wrong and become better people because of it.
Ally Marcino