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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