Gimundo Canada: Students Wear Pink to Stop School Bullying

School can be as traumatizing as any battlefield. There are the locker room wedgies, the Dodgeball attacks, the lunchroom shunnings. But even the most cringe-worthy moment from your high school days probably doesn't compare to the humiliation felt by one freshman male from Central Kings Rural High School in Nova Scotia, who dared to wear a pink shirt on the first day of school last year.

The poor boy paid dearly for his fashion choice: A group of older students mocked him relentlessly, threatening to beat him up.

The incident might have served as a warning for other males at the school to avoid anything in pastels. But instead, two senior boys, David Shepherd and Travis Price, took up the bullied boy's cause as a rallying cry.

"Kids don't need this in their lives, worrying about what to wear to school," Price told The Chronicle Herald. "That should be the last thing on their minds."

The two seniors were sick of the abuse – so they came up with a plan to make the bullies see red. Or rather, pink.

The following day, the two boys came to school armed with a pile of 75 pink tank tops, which they handed out to all of the male students to wear – including the bullied freshman. As word of their mission spread through the school, more students showed up wearing something pink of their own. Shepherd and Price estimated that around half of the school's 830 students put on something pink in solidarity.

"The bullies got angry," Chase said. "One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We're glad we got the response we wanted."

The stunt proved so popular, in fact, that it's led to an official Anti-Bullying Day in Nova Scotia on the second Thursday of every school year. British Columbia has recently adopted their own version, on February 27th of each year. For both holidays, students are encouraged to dress in pink to show acceptance of their fellow students, proving that there's nothing wrong with showing your true colors after all.

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