Meagan Latt knows the isolation and helpless feelings bullying can cause firsthand.
“When I was in Grade 6, I was bullied a lot,” said the Grade 12 Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate and Vocational Institute student at the high school’s anti-bullying event Wednesday.
Churchill students participated in the Day of Pink, a national anti-bullying campaign that started in 2007 when a male high school student was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school in Nova Scotia.
The next day students wore pink shirts to show their support for the bullied teen.
Members of the school’s gay-straight alliance were passing out pink ribbons for students to wear to show they stand against bullying.
Latt said she sees bullying happening at her school, mostly name-calling, and they want students to know there is a safe space at Churchill.
“The most important thing is you go to someone when you feel that way and you talk about it and you get help and sort it out before it gets too far,” she said.
The Day of Pink also aims to encourage students to stop bullying when they see it happen.
Student services chair Lorraine Christy said bullying happens in every school, in the malls and on the street.
“We do deal with it,” she said. “It’s of varying degrees at varying levels. Sometimes it’s very insidious. Sometimes it’s just excluding a student in a classroom. That’s bullying.”
Part of the Day of Pink is to make sure students know there is a place they can go for support if they’re being bullied.
“We know there are kids out there who are being isolated, who are being bullied, who are not feeling supported in this school. We’re hoping that they see people around who are talking about it, who are showing support and those are kids they may want to go talk with,’ Christy said.
The campaign is making a difference. Christy said they’ve had more and more students come up and grab a pink ribbon or wear a pink shirt over the past few years.
“I’m not sure we would have had the same number of students doing this four years ago when we first started,” she said.
