Bullying isn’t Right!!!

Chris Zweep sits in front of the home page of his online anti-bullying website Sunday at his Thunder Bay-area home.

Chris Zweep knows all about being picked on.
He met bullies and their cruel taunts, deliberate and offhand, when he first stepped into a school yard at age five.
It followed him when he moved from one elementary school to another in an attempt to escape it.
Always skinny no matter how much he ate, he was picked on because he looked different, said Zweep, now 15 and in Grade 10 at Thunder Bay’s Hammarskjold High School.
Physical bullying, emotional abuse, death threats, depression and just wanting to die are all things he’s familiar with.
He started thinking he wanted to do something about it.

Last year, in Grade 9, Zweep joined an anti-bullying committee of teachers and students, called safe@school.
The group introduced a confidential 24-hour phone line students can call to report bullying, a multi-media art contest, and a survey of student experiences and views on bullying.
He worried that enough wasn’t being done, so he struck out on his own as well.
To date, he’s collected reams of information and posted it on his own website. He wrote a personal manifesto of sorts, in 14 chapters, and posted it on that website. Zweep wants to publish it someday as a book.
He developed a slide show presentation for elementary kids he hopes to present in schools next year.
He wants to work on bullying at a national level, and he says he’s proud of what he’s done.
Seems he’s not the only one.
Last fall, school social worker David Hand nominated the teen for an award through the Canadian Safe School Network.
Zweep said he was “kind of shocked, kind of awed” that Hand and two other teachers — the award requires three — would nominate him.
On Christmas Eve, he thought a package in the mail was a gift from family. Instead, it was from the national charity dedicated to making schools safer, telling him he’s one of only two students in Canada to win the inaugural award.
Mom Svet said it was a “pretty exciting night” in the Zweep household.
Last week, the Lakehead District School Board gave recognized his national award.
“It’s nice to be recognized,” said Zweep, adding he does what he does for kids who get pushed into lockers or picked last in gym class, not to be famous. “Nice to be respected.”
And that’s what it’s all about: respect.
He knows everyone isn’t going to like each other, but they can treat each other with respect and not gossip or mock, he explained.
“I think of it as the modern day civil rights movement,” said Zweep.
Though the anti-bullying movement isn’t about race, it is about kids being picked on because they’re different.
Now, he’s bullied far less. And now, he defends himself verbally. You’ve got to stand up for yourself, said Zweep.
Listen to and read Zweep’s words and you’ll hear a cautious teenager who doesn’t trust peers easily, who learned the hard way to solve his own problems. He said he goes to school for education and not to make friends.
But the 16-year-old also has something to say about the power of true friendship, about standing up for yourself through words. He talks about that precious, ethereal thing called a child’s self-esteem, and he advises kids to introduce their friends to parents — and trusting a parent’s instincts about a prospective friend. He noted bullies are people too, people who are likely hurting.
Zweep and his parents say the response over the years to their complaints about bullying depended on who they were talking to — some cared, some didn’t.
Schools need to let students know they care, said the teen.
Support networks — like the one her son is helping to create through safe@schools — are necessary, she said.
“I’m not going to get rid of bullying,” said Zweep. “The people who are going to get rid of bullying are the ones who do it. I’m just the one who hands out the information.”
Zweep’s website is at www.antibully.tk