After a number of experiences of getting bullied at school and immense frustration with teachers and the principals not handling the matter fairly or effectively, my two sons and I designed interactive comic strips that would teach young children empathy, as our research had shown it prevented bully behaviour. We created three different scenarios with interactions on each page, which could either be used as a teaching tool or worked/played through by children with parent supervision.
The Adventures of Bully & BOO were launched during International Anti-Bullying Week in November 2014 and made available free of charge world-wide. Every subsequent year, we would repeat the campaign with media coverage and global accessibility for a whole week. We were delighted and proud to reach more than 1500 destinations including schools, pre-schools, churches, other community organisations and individuals all over the world in 30+ countries!
The interactive comic strips were also added to the Western Cape Department of Education (WECD) online portal as a learning resource and was translated into five languages – English, Afrikaans, French, Spanish and Xhosa.
Our campaigns were featured on TV programmes, Radio talks,
in Magazines, newspapers and more. Here are some examples…
We donated modules to schools and disadvantaged communities and created promotional materials such as tags, armbands and more with every year’s campaign.
We also designed a special clothing range for the hashtag Boo to Bullies
