Wednesday is Pink Shirt Day! Its mission is to create a more kind, inclusive world by raising awareness for anti-bullying initiatives.
Inspired by an act of kindness in small-town Nova Scotia, teenagers in 2007 organized a high school protest to wear pink in sympathy with a Grade 9 boy who was being bullied for wearing a pink shirt. Pink Shirt Day falls on the last Wednesday of February every year. It has since been recognized annually worldwide, as a day to stand against bullying.
“When we are talking about the importance of Pink Shirt Day, this isn’t something that can be addressed one day a year. It’s something we address in an ongoing way through our classroom, through our activities, through our health classes and as things come up on the playground,” says Caryn Swark, associate principal at Our Lady of the Assumption School.
Swark believes it’s important to have Pink Shirt Day to remind kids if they are feeling isolated or are being targeted, they are not alone. “There are ways to respond to that, to find resources to help them and to remind students that might be engaged in the targeting to really think about what they are doing, what their motivations are and other ways they can find that security for themselves without taking away somebody else’s right to be themselves, express themselves and be different.”
One of the big things to come out of the pandemic is a lot of students have more anxiety about being in school, says Swark. “They’re having more stress, more worry than what we were seeing prior to the pandemic. A big part of that is for students finding their place in the social frame of things. For some of them, if they missed school during COVID-19, that’s a challenge and they might not have the connections they would have had with their peers otherwise. Or they may not have always developed the same social skills they would have developed being in school.”
According to Swark, whenever a diverse group of people are assembled, “you’re going to have conflict, you’re going to have people who don’t think the same and people that don’t believe the same.”
“Our goal at Assumption has always been to frame that as a feature, not a bug,” adds Swark. “To help students see each other and their differences, as positive things and ways to learn from each other and ways to connect with each other.”
The origins of Pink Shirt Day, Swark says, shows a student who chose to go against the established norm for boys at his school by wearing something different and immediately became targeted and singled out. “We want our students to be free to express themselves, express their individuality, express their personality and their beliefs.”
Swark says whether or not students agree, Assumption would like students to have the skills to address differences respectfully and view them as part of the school’s diverse community, rather than as a threat.
“I think that’s where a lot of bullying comes from is when people perceive a threat to either the status quo or a threat to their position in their friend group or what have you. That’s where a lot of the bullying and targeting comes from, it’s coming from a place of fear,” Swark notes.
