Editorial

How to part painlessly with toxic people. How to break up with someone you can't be together with.

Assertiveness is the ability to take responsibility for your behavior.

Vladimir Karpovich Zheleznikov (1925-2015), a Russian and Soviet writer and playwright, has written many good books for children, including two of my favorite novels, The Weird of Five B. and The Scarecrow. But few people know that Vladimir Zheleznikov, long before he wrote the first novel in Russian children's literature, The Scarecrow (1983), which was entirely devoted to school bullying, created the script for the filmstrip I Am Redhead (1976).

Only the hero's actions, not the skin color of Christ and his mother, have made us think about our community with him for two millennia, sympathize with his torments, rejoice to receive the news of his Resurrection. I talked to the kids about this.

Modern teenagers express their attitude to life in different ways: some keep a diary, some have frank conversations with friends, but there are some guys who speak out through comics who invent and draw themselves. There are a lot of kids among my students who create comics. They show them to me, and sometimes I can draw an idea of what is happening in a child's life right now. Sometimes children, commenting on a comic book, say that their characters are a collective image, and sometimes they admit that they are themselves. The comic book heroine Lia Katayeva (11 years old) is a girl named Tina, who has a younger sister Olya. Leah also has a younger sister, and she would like to be like her heroine Tina, a brave and bright girl. Tina and Olya have a very good relationship. So I chose for the preview a picture of Tina letting her little sister do her hair. This cute scene captures the overall spirit of Leah's comics. They have no aggression at all, but they convey the emotions of the characters very well. However, almost all teenagers face violence and bullying from peers. Even if they don't get bullied themselves at school, they often witness these situations. I've chosen several Leah comics about school bullying to be published on our website. If this topic appears in children's comics, it means that they have experienced bullying at school. I liked that Lia herself offered children one of the possible ways out of the bullying situation, namely: children can seek help or moral support from their older siblings, adults whom the child trusts.

Especially for mobbingu.net, Lena Corallo, a radio journalist from the UK, spoke about measures being taken to prevent bullying in English schools.

Why is it so important to be able to fight back against hamams and aggressors? People who were raised in families where children were ignored, devalued or suppressed have not developed protective skills to behave with their elders, and then with those who are superior to them. As children, they did not learn to set boundaries, as they obeyed parents who had no idea of the boundaries of a small person's personality. And it is likely that even in adulthood, such people will not be able to set these boundaries in relations with colleagues and superiors. If we don't finally learn how to protect ourselves from presumptuous boors, we won't be able to protect our children or teach them how to defend themselves.

While everything is more or less clear with physical violence, everything is not so simple with emotional/psychological violence, as it is quite difficult to identify and even harder to prove.