Editorial: In the pink to beat bullying

I had a pink T-shirt once and had no qualms about wearing it. But then I think things were a little different back in 1975 when the bloke in the band Dragon also had one, as did a bloke in a rather staunch motorcycle club ... and no one was going to suggest to him there was anything "dodgy" about it.

Some kids were still wearing tie-dye shirts too, which tended to reinforce that fashion (an individual's interpretation of it) took no prisoners.

But it may have been different had a kid worn a pink shirt to school on a mufti day.

I knew some lads who would have collected together (as mindless wild animals do) and pursued the wearer of such an item.

Which makes it the ideal piece of apparel to lead a day when the mindlessness and callousness of bullies is put under the spotlight.

It is Pink Shirt Day today.

It is in its fourth year in New Zealand and has continued to grow since its introduction - which was in the wake of the first of its kind being staged in Canada as a group of students all wore pink shirts the day after a kid had been bullied for wearing one.

It was a show of solidarity, a display of mass distaste at the action of bullies and it has gone global.

Bullying is low and the ripple effects it leaves behind never completely disappear for those targeted by bullies.

I never suffered it but saw bullies in action at school, and it was unpleasant.

Kids like me were small and walked a wide path around those we knew could make a day, or a week, or an entire term, miserable.

I remember once, along with another classmate, consoling a kid who had been roughed up, simply because of his name.

A name is not something you can change when you're 13 years old, so he got targeted ... until his older brother turned up after school one afternoon and started asking kids to point out the two names he had of two kids "I want a word with".

The issue was effectively resolved there and then, but probably not in the most diplomatic of ways.

In recent years, a previously unseen and very insidious form of bullying has emerged - cyber bullying.

Kids have mobile phones and, to the detriment of their spelling skills, love to text. They text good and they text bad.

And Facebook, that "post it and see what happens" mouthpiece which has been widely embraced.

Online is fair game, it seems.

One nasty comment aimed at one person can echo across the e-world.

One moment of immature madness, and one foul accusation or opinion, can be stabbed on to the keys of a phone and dispatched to anyone and everyone.

And some will climb aboard the "let's get him (or her)" posse and reply or send it on further.

They've started crushing boy racers' cars. How about crushing cellphones of known abusers?

Anything that leads to addressing bullying, and creates discussion and desires to reduce it, gets my vote.

I shall dig deep through the mothballed cartons in the garage in search of that pink T-shirt of years long passed.

Okay, it may not fit any more but I shall carry it as a hanky with pride.