First lady Melania Trump, looking for a suitable role in her husband’s administration, has declared she will be an advocate for bullied youth.
“Children and teenagers can be fragile,” Mrs. Trump proclaimed in November. “Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and to teenagers.” She pledged to protect those who are mocked or bullied.
She has yet to take up that mantle, but if Melania is looking to get going, she might want to take note of a new effort in Norway, which would appear to be a hotbed of toddler-on-toddler abuse. According to Norwegian news site thelocal.no, the municipality of Oslo has felt obliged to appoint “a permanent official to fight bullying in the Norwegian capital’s schools from daycare age upwards.”
That’s right. Norway’s bullying epidemic is so severe that an educational bureaucrat is being tasked with nipping it in the “daycare age” bud. This terrible situation is all the more shocking when you consider that the World Happiness Report this year named Norway the happiest country on earth. That must mean that even the happiest children on earth are calling each other names. Count The Scrapbook as profoundly disillusioned.
But at least there’s no shortage of helpers eager to help. More than a hundred educational professionals applied to be the official anti-bullying ombudsperson. The position was awarded to Kjerstin Owren, who promised to be visible: “It must be easy for children and young people to know how they can get in touch with the bullying ombudsman,” she said. It was not clear how she planned to make sure the tykes in daycare would be able to reach her.
