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The music, like so many other passions, allows us to escape from everyday life.
Picture by Free-Photos from Pixabay
Life can be difficult but passions, arts, allow us to escape this word for another: our own word.
The importance of escaping, influence of the arts, can be a matter of life and death for many people: women, men, child destroyed day after day by women, men, child for various reasons. This is called Harassment or Bullying (for school harassment).
Harassment/Bullying, as defined by organizations like UNICEF, is repetitive violence in various forms raging from moral harassment to physical harassment or even sexual harassment.
In 2018 the UNESCO explained that, worldwide, one in three young people is the victim of school bullying.
In 2017 the french government (through a study group) directed a national study with the following results: a woman dies every three days and a man every twenty-six, killed by their current or former partner.
To fight harassment many events are organized, many tools are used, like music: using art (music, dance, ...) helps to transmit messages of peace, raise awareness about bullying and use celebrities’ influence to fight harassment.
A song to remember
In just a month, in September 2010, in the USA, nine students have commited suicides after having been bullied because of their sexual orientation. The "Journal of Educational Psychology" published a study and they explain that 25% of young people, from kindergarten to the end of high school, are victims of bullying.
The public opinion was choked and the government focused on cyberbullying and awareness among young people. And among this awareness music is one of the best :
Make it Stop is the best proof of this.
Make it Stop, sung by the punk rock group "Rise Against", is about this sad event.
Rise Against’s frontman Tim McIlrath explains about Make It Stop Genesis:
"A number of events were the catalyst for the creation of “Make It Stop”, everything from the suicides in September 2010, to our own fans voicing their fears and insecurities from time to time,"
"I decided to create the song as a response, and when I discovered the It Gets Better campaign and [Gets Better Project is another response against bullying] Dan Savage's [co-founder of Gets Better] commitment to such an important and concise message, I was moved. I immediately felt that if our song is the road, then the It Gets Better project is the destination. I hope the synergy between the two can reach people and make a difference."
A song to remember, A song to avoid the same mistakes.
Music with Video : Another form of Awareness
You can have many other ways for raise awareness with music’s help on such a subject for example by adding dance giving an image of pain or suffering like the French song SLT (For the song you can have english subtitle in automatic translation), a song about street harassment, that was the choice of dancers to express themselves about an important subject like harassment. Images, illustrating an important subject, can be very impactful as the singer explains in this video (in french with subtitle included) : people understand a shocking message better than a tame one (every people can be touched by this message no matter their place, role or situation).
Other form of Awareness
To conclude of course, we are on a music blog but it was important to talk about other forms of awareness like cartoons, movies, or hashtags. We live in a word where social media, internet and IT toolsare, in general, open to everyone: unfortunately we have a lot of cyber-bullying, bashing, but we have many beautiful things too, many good things for awareness about harassment and other social problems.
Time change, a new generation takes the place, but we need to be focused and raise awareness about harassment.
We need to do that from a very young age because:
The first forms of harassment begin at a very young age
Young people imitate their elders (mimesis)
Young people are our future
Our responsability is to educate the next generation so they don't make the same mistakes we do
Bullying and Harassment can destroy a life, change destinies, and can be the cause of many death: Each and every one of us need to play a role in making things change even if it just means listening to music with someone who needs it!
"Transit umbra, sed lux permanet"
"The shadow withdraw, but the light stays"
latin proverb
Blog Post by Pierre
Hey Pierre! I know how concerned your feel about this topic and it's still so nice to see you have so much energy when talking about it. I'm conviced that music is, as you said, a way to escape, but also the best way to make people sensitive about serious topics like this one, and raise awareness in general. Sometimes, when you see the way some people act, it's hard to believe we're in the 21st century... I'll add that your article has a rich content, and it was a pleasure to read it!
Thank you for this well documented post. I was very touched by reading and listening to songs.
Music, dance and maybe culture in general are outlet, or “windows” which allow us to escape, comfort us sometimes, and we need them.
But as you highlight it, there are also good ways to fight, to pass a message, through emotion most than reason only…and not feeling alone with things that make us being what we are.
This engaged post is full of hope, thank for that and keep it up !
Lisa
In the process of growing up, learning to practice tolerance is key. This post shows again that music is a universal language that can help engaging awareness of social related topics and expressing our deepest emotions. It can also help defining our personality within groups and finding like-minded people to connect with.
Thank you for this excellent post!
Blogging about music shouldn't be just about the last song we heard or last gig we saw... And you do it so right!
Harassment is such a very serious topic and the more we talk about it, the more we read about it, the more we can educate ourselves and our kids not to bully, to recognise it, to denounce it and most of all, to stop suffering from it...!
The way you deal with this difficult subject linked with music is very clever and relevant.
Thank you again.
Hey Paul
Thank you very much for your comment
Pierre