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Kindness matters. Kindness saves lives.

Are you who our youth need us to be?

Alicia Rust
4 min readApr 2, 2019
Photo from Unsplash

Being the target of relentless bullying wears you down.

What is bullying?

Here is the legal definition:

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school-aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Both kids who are bullied and who bully others may have serious, lasting problems.

In order to be considered bullying, the behavior must be aggressive and include:

An Imbalance of Power: Kids who bully use their power — such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity — to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people.

Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once.

→Yet, what if the words and actions aren’t necessarily repeated by the same person on a regular basis? Then, this definition doesn’t fit. It’s just considered “mean”. Why be mean? It’s still aggressive. Pain is still inflicted.

Bullying and…

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Alicia Rust
Alicia Rust

Written by Alicia Rust

Writer. Lover of dark chocolate, coffee, tea, & being me. I’m an anxiety-ridden, chronic depression survivor.

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