Bullying is a major problem that society is currently facing. Luckily, Toronto Police are bringing awareness to the streets. Officers Ryan Willmer and Luke Watson are doing their part to support Day of Pink this week and stop bullying once and for all.
Day of Pink is an anti-bullying campaign celebrated throughout Canada on the second Wednesday of April each year. The day specifically targets bullying and discrimination towards the LGBTQ community.
Officer Willmer took to Twitter earlier this week promising that if he received 500 retweets by Wednesday his muscular, tattooed colleague would dye his hair pink in support of the day. According to Yahoo Beauty, Watson showed up to work on Wednesday unaware of Willmer’s plan, or the 560 retweets it had received. Fortunately Watson was more than willing to go pink for a good cause.
The Toronto officer posted a selfie of his new look. This time promising the Internet that he’d keep the look for a week if the photo received 1000 retweets, it do. In fact the photo received well over 5000 retweets, and 2500 favourites. Now Willmer and Watson are getting the message out there in the hopes of stopping bullying.
Day of Pink was started in Nova Scotia when two students saw a gay classmate being bullied for wearing pink. Most Good Samaritans would stop the bully and call it a day, but these two wanted to do more. They went out and bought pink shirts of their own and wore them to school, and encouraged others to do likewise. This simple act of kindness was quickly noticed and spread throughout the nation.
According to Statistics Canada, sexual orientation is the third largest motivation for hate crime in our nation, with Ontario seeing the highest rate of hate crime per capita. Stats also show that hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation are most likely to happen to people age 18-24, followed by people under 18.
Hamilton, Thunder Bay, and Peterborough make up the top three cities to experience hate crimes per capita in Canada.
