Last year my daughter was a victim of verbal and physical bullying in her own classroom. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do seeing my child come home day after day crying about the abusive behavior of one child. One child who ruined an otherwise really happy first year of school.

I worked tirelessly to prevent any harm from coming to my child, including removing her from the school system who chose to turn a blind eye to the repeated harassment. (My Mama Bear was out!) While I cannot know whether the bullying was due to any knowledge of gender issues, from the outside it didn’t seem to be the case. My daughter attended school stealth so that her birth gender wasn’t the focus of the Kindergarten year and education was. We only wanted a positive experience. What we got was a nightmare of epic proportions ending with my daughter waking up in the middle of the night screaming that the bullying child was hurting her.

Clearly this isn’t anyone’s idea of Kindergarten for their child. Once school was over and my child was freed from her daily stalker, we sat down and wrote a children’s book (the next one in the series) about how Hope sees a friend being bullied on the playground and acts as an ally. Cathartic experience for both of us. (Of course I needed to take that extra step so I went on to write a chapter in my novel about what parents can do before, during and after a bullying incident to protect their children. Don’t get me started on how I filed a formal complaint and had the school investigated!)

As the weeks turned to months it became crystal clear that Hope didn’t only have issues with the child, but with her teacher and the Principal who turned their heads when they knew this child would torture her every day. They failed her. They failed the other child. They didn’t protect her at all. The trust that should have been established in that classroom, her only indication of what school was all about, was irrevocably broken.

Why didn’t anyone stand up? Afterward parents would come to me and tell me that their child would tell them about how Hope was bullied every day and my response was, “Why didn’t you say something?” Deer in the headlights back at me. They didn’t have to take on the whole school system, but they could have come to me or someone in the administration sooner. Perhaps they did and no one listened? Do we really have to live in fear of the people whose jobs are to educate our children? Shouldn’t we expect that someone, anyone, will speak up and advocate if a child is harmed at school and when they do they will be heard and taken seriously? The epidemic of bullying has to be stopped.

All summer we worked on confidence building so that she could begin to trust that not all educators are that negligent. Not everyone will let her down. We talked about seeing the child who bullies as a person with serious problems who needs help to stop their destructive behavior. It’s been slow, but positive. We talk a lot about how we are allies for others, how we believe in the safety of all people and how we have a voice to use when we see something going wrong.

It’s not going to change the world right now, but it has created two little loving advocates in my children. I can’t say I appreciate the experience we had last year. It was brutal. But it did lead us to where we are right now, where we are all more compassionate for others, both for the people getting hurt and for the troubled people who hurt them.