THE BOY UNDER THE DESK
I was that boy.
Small-framed. Easy target.
In the early 1980s, in a secondary school, bigger boys and seniors who should have known better, decided that my size was an invitation. I was tortured. I was maimed. I was made to crawl under a desk and hold myself in that fetal position for hours. Hours.
Nobody called it bullying then. It had a different name - rite of passage. As though surviving cruelty was the qualification for manhood.
I survived. I grew. I became.
But what nobody tells you about survival is that; the boy under the desk never fully leaves. He sits quietly somewhere inside the man at this table. For years, I carried what happened to me in silence, and suffered bouts of depression because I couldn't tell no soul. Not even my parents.
That silence was the real crime.
Not just the silence of a frightened boy, but the silence of teachers who saw and looked away. The silence of peers who laughed and said nothing. The silence of a system that confused cruelty with character-building. The silence of a culture that said this is how boys become men.
But here is where it gets concerning. The bully didn't disappear when school ended. He graduated. He entered our offices, institutions, and government houses. The boy who learned that size and fear were power, is still performing that lesson, in bigger arenas, and with higher stakes.
This is why I am today calling for a dedicated national anti-bullying law that formally defines and recognizes bullying as a harm distinct from general misconduct, mandates every school to have a written anti-bullying policy, creates reporting obligations for school administrators, and establishes consequences for institutional cover-up or negligence.
Regulation (under the supervision of the Ministry of Education) must also extend to teacher training institutions. Pre-service and in-service training should include child safeguarding, bullying identification, and intervention methods. A teacher who cannot recognise or respond to bullying is an institutional liability.
I might have been that boy under the desk.
But I refuse to be that adult that says nothing.
Watch the complete episode on A PLACE AT THE TABLE on @NewsCentralTV https://t.co/pRVEhCTq3x
You see this particular post?? You must not understand, just reshare pls so it will get to the people who need it. You will be unconsciously saving a woman.