By Katie Gauthier
Prominent members within Ottawa’s literary community are voicing their concerns about the problem of bullying
“Kids have a way of dealing with the child who sticks out,” says writer Molly Wolf. “They hammer the offending child down, as a carpenter would knock a protruding nail head flat with the board.”
Wolf was one of about 15 writers who took to the National Arts Centre stage to show support for the 16-year-old Cornwall-area teenager charged with uttering death threats after writing a fictional story about a bullied teen who planned to blow up his school.
About 300 people of all ages attended the awareness event and fund-raiser hosted by the Ottawa International Writers Festival.
Although the event’s main message was support for freedom of speech, several writers spoke out against bullying.
Wolf says she has followed the Cornwall-area teenager’s case and contacted the Writers Festival about sharing her experiences with bullying.
“I have such a stock of anger built up, pressed down and overflowing, about our experiences that it would scald steel if I let it fly unguarded,” she says.
Wolf says, like the accused teenager, schoolyard bullies routinely victimized her oldest son since the first grade.
She says she experienced the “grief and fear” of sending a child to school, knowing he would be taunted and hit every time the teacher was not looking.
“I saw my own small six-year-old son, wandering alone, head down, shoulders hunched, hands driven into his jacket pockets, tears streaming down his face,” says Wolf.
Author Merilyn Simonds is equally troubled by school bullying.
She says she is worried about society’s “distaste for dealing with situations,” including bullying behaviour.
Simonds says when her son was 15-years-old, he was chased into the woods and held at gunpoint for several hours. Although the gun was not loaded, she called the police.
“The police were fabulous and resolved the situation,” says Simonds.
“They talked to the kid and took him through the jail cells. They showed him what would happen to him.”
“I don’t have the same faith that calling the police in that situation today would have the same kind of result,” she adds.
“I don’t know what has changed in our society to make that true.”
Sean Wilson, artistic director of the Writers Festival, says people are overreacting to incidents such as the Columbine school shootings.
“There is a collective hysteria surrounding the outcast kid who is going to kill everybody,” he says. “Nobody is looking at the real problem, school bullies.”
Wilson says the Cornwall-area teenager should be commended, not prosecuted.
“I cannot think of a better, healthier response to bullying than writing a short story,” he says.
Novelist Elisabeth Harvor says some good may come from this teenager’s case.
“The good thing, if there can be a good thing about all of this, is that bullying, long overdue for passionate discussion, is now the topic of phone-in shows, newspaper editorials, coffee breaks and fiction writers,” she says.
Wolf admits she does not yet have all the facts about the teenager’s case.
“All I care about is that another kid has spent years being pounded into applesauce on the playground,” says Wolf.
“And I want to sit down with his mother over tea and Kleenex because she and I have a whole lot to cry about.”