Today boys are bullying and girls are bullying. Increasingly the two-dimensional stereotype of the hulking dumb thug fails. And though the meaning of the numbers is debated, with some suggesting that bullying is only reported more frequently now, the fact remains that more than one in four students experience bullying in school today. In 2003, just five years earlier, only 7 percent of students had reported being bullied. In the fall of 2011, Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), reported to the second annual Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention Summit that 28 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 18 reported being bullied during the 2008-2009 school year. Will evangelicals who are concerned with social justice-liberating the captives, healing the sick, and feeding the hungry-respond to school bullying? Will we engage today with those who are bruised, bound by fear, and hungry because their lunch money has been extorted, to offer hope? Christians today are being presented with the opportunity both to think theologically about bullying and to implement creative solutions to protect the most vulnerable among us.Īcross the nation, the number of students who are reporting being bullied is on the rise. The call of Christ is always for the downtrodden and, unfortunately, it seems like Christians have been slow to respond.”
Dan Weiss, former senior analyst for media and sexuality at Focus on the Family, remarks, “Bullying has come to the fore of national consciousness in the past few years, and it is time our culture takes this more seriously. Today Peretti, and others, recognizing the inherent evil of bullying, are asking if this might not be the moment for Christians to take a stand. And though we know instinctively that it’s not right, few of us have been willing to stand up and declare it to be wrong.
Kids will be kids, right? For years, too many adults have been willing to shrug off bullying as one of the unpreventable chronic difficulties of childhood. Whether we were raised watching Little Rascals, Little House on the Prairie, or Stuart Little, many of us have resigned ourselves to the fact that, at the end of the day, the dull, muscle-bound bully will have confiscated the lunch money of the weak underdog. His story puts human flesh on the current rise in school bullying. Popular Christian author Frank Peretti describes, in excruciating detail, the abuse he endured in childhood in his book No More Bullies: For Those Who Wound or Are Wounded. Impulsively pushed away, he fell, naked, into another wet body.Īnother demanded, “Hey, squirt, you looking for trouble?” Raising a knee to protect his groin, Frank slipped, falling toward a bench of amused onlookers. Frank was the smallest and weakest boy in the locker room, and his tormentors laughed when he cried out in pain. When the moist gym towel snapped, it caught the prepubescent boy between the legs.
Moving from “just kids being kids” to justice for kids
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