Q: The other night I saw a small group of girls harassing one of my neighbour’s daughters. The girls encircled their victim, screamed insults and refused to let her out of the circle when she tried to escape.
I am just sick about it. My neighbour’s daughter has a bit of a limp when she walks but she seems to deal with it, and she has nothing but smiles and enthusiasm when I pass her while walking on the street.
Maybe it is the age of the other kids, I don’t know. They seemed to be about 13 or 14 years old.
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I just do not know why they would do that to this other girl, and I honestly do not know what to do about it. I just hope that it does not happen again.
If you have some suggestions, please pass them on to me.
A: I hope you talk to your neigh-bours about what you saw happening to their daughter.
Hopefully they will report the incident to the police, and having you as a collaborative witness adds credibility to their concerns.
What the girls did is illegal. They should have to face the full power of the juvenile justice system and be held accountable for what they did.
You witnessed a form of bullying that I call swarming.
Fortunately, it is not something that happens that often, but when it does, it can be devastating. The young girl caught in the middle of the circle must have been terrified.
Swarming has the potential to cause life-long psychological damage to the victims.
Even worse, in the rare case where it has escalated from verbal to physical abuse, it can be life threatening. That is what happened to Reena Virk, the young girl from Victoria who died after being swarmed and assaulted by a group of her friends.
The cause of the swarming is easy to identify – the inability of the perpetrators to accept that some of their peer group might be different. It also leads to the question about whether the community of adults in which the children live is able to accept those who do not fit the general expectations.
In simple language, it is discrimination at its worst, which children often learn from the adults who raise them. The biblical instruction to judge not lest you too be judged is a clear remin-der that each person has their own unique personality.
Abuse, bullying and swarming are ways of not accepting the uniqueness and differences in the other person, of trying to make everyone the same.
An example of this is what the Canadian government did when it tried to rid First Nations people of their cultures by insisting that their children attend residential schools.
Another example is what community gossips try to do when they start unfair rumours about neighbours.
Perhaps if all of you can accept peoples’ differences, including this little girl’s limp, you will be able to penetrate the generation gap and will, by example, teach those children that they too can be sensitive to those who are different.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
