From a Mother

From a mother
My daughter, who is now 12, took the KidPower workshop three years ago. "Recently, we moved to a smaller town to get away from the violence in the city. My daughter was very excited about going to her first formal dress-up dance at her new school. It must have been poorly supervised because a group of about 15 9th grade boys started playing a game where they captured girls by linking arms in a circle around them.

The first time my daughter and her 7th grade friends were surrounded, they just moved away. They felt awkward about this "game", but this was their first time at a school dance and they didn’t know what to think. My daughter saw that three other girls who got captured later were disheveled and crying. She saw the boys pawing at the girls and making sexual remarks.

Then she and her friends were surrounded again. This time, one boy grabbed our daughter from behind and tried to put his hand up her shirt. She stomped on his foot and elbowed him in the groin.

This action broke the circle and my daughter and her friends were able to escape. It also stopped the behavior of the boys and they left all the girls alone for the rest of the dance. The story went through the school that my gentle 7th grade daughter had beaten up a 9th grade boy! She was a hero! A number of girls have come up to her to tell her how glad they were that she did what she did and to ask her for advice on what they might do.

My husband and I have written a letter to the school describing the incident and demanding that preventative action be taken through better supervision of school events and training for both the boys and the girls. We believe that our daughter’s KIDPOWER training, even after three years, helped her handle an awful experience in a way which left her feeling empowered instead of helpless."

posted by Robert Heard at 9:14 AM