A retired police Sergeant is touring Saskatchewan as part of an awareness campaign about bullying and cyber-bulling
Brian Trainor wrote a comic book about the problem called Jason’s Nightmare and also co-authored the novel Bully 4U.
The comic book ended up being distributed throughout the province.
On Wednesday he headed to Green Lake to talk to students at St. Pascal School but found time for an interview on the road.
He says his research find that bullies often come out of homes where they were allowed to be aggressive at an early age.
He doesn’t think bullying begins as a result of necessarily bad parenting, but it’s sometimes caused by improper parenting.
There are two groups.
One, he says involves parents that don’t correct their kids at all.
The other involves parents who are dictatorial and very strict.
He says the problems begin when these kids encounter difficult situations and don’t know how to resolve them:
“If their behavior is not corrected and they’re not shown other methods of dealing with ways to settle disputes and arguments other than aggression they’re going to come away thinking this is the way to deal with it,” he says.
Trainor says kids who are being cyber-bullied need to block the emails, un-friend certain people from facebook and tell an adult.
“They need to tell the principle or a teacher. We all had a teacher in school that we really liked, there’s always one teacher you gravitate to. Talk to that teacher, tell them what’s going on, because you can’t deal with this yourself.”
He says that’s especially true when the bully is acting anonymously through a computer.
In addition to Green Lake, Trainor has also talked to kids at Kawacatoose, Muskoday and the George Gordon First Nation.