Eradicating bullying through dialogue

Protea Glen Primary school number 2 held an anti-bullying campaign last Friday as a way of educating learners about matters of bullying, how to identify and how to deal with it.

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This is after the school saw a rise in bullying cases reported on a daily basis.

Parents and different stakeholders made it to the venue dressed in white and red t shirts and their left shoes on the right while the right was worn on the left.

This was to send a message of how uncomfortable it is to be a victim of bullying and the influence it has on a learner.

Different grades performed their #Nobullying items during the course of the event.

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Speaking to the school principal, Siphiwe kgatla, he stated that the awareness was about dealing with the challenges that the school go through on a daily basis.

“We are experiencing violent behaviour which is referred to as bullying. A number of our learners are reporting to the office about bullying,” he explained.

Kgatla went on to say that the on the morning of the event, he experienced another case of bullying where a learner was slapped by another learner to an extent that the victim had nose bleeding.

“We have invited the parents and other stakeholders to assist us as an institution in eradicating bullying in the school, unitedly we can fight this,” he added.

The school is very much aware of what happened to the bullied learner in Limpopo last year and they do not want to be a statistics on that matter.

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“We want to ensure that the school doesn’t experience any form of bullying and we are going to need the parents and the community to interfere,” he further said.

Bullying has a capability of manifesting itself in different ways, intentionally and unintentionally.

The school has taken it upon itself to punctuate every lesson in the classroom with a notion of bullying.

In term of dealing with perpetrators, the school solicited the help of help of Teddy Bear Clinic social workers, district officials and SAPS to address the learners in the assembly.

“When it comes to perpetrators, we give them counselling as we believe that they need help and are probably not aware of what they are doing.

If there’s no change in the learner’s behaviour that’s when we call in the parents for an intervention,” he concluded.