White House launches anti-bullying campaign in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu

Washington: The White House has teamed up with a Sikh and an Asia Pacific community group to launch a public awareness campaign in six languages, including Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, to address bullying.

The resources for the “Act To Change” campaign are also available in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese as one out of three in the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community do not speak English fluently.

“Growing up, sometimes people made me feel like an outsider; I was the perfect storm of nerdy, gay, and Indian American,” wrote Maulik Pancholy, a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on AAPI discussing the campaign.

"But now, I’ve come to find that those very things that were sometimes used as fodder against me are the things I love the most about myself," he wrote in a White House blog post.

“And we’ve seen that certain AAPI groups - including South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Micronesian, and limited English proficient youth - are more likely to be the targets of bullying,” Pancholy wrote.

In addition to raising awareness, the campaign encourages AAPI youth and adults to share their stories, engage in community dialogues, and take action against bullying.

The campaign website, ActToChange.org, includes video and music empowerment playlists, and encourages one to “Take a Pledge” to join the #ActToChange movement and stand up against bullying.

Sikh children are acutely vulnerable to abuse in our nation’s schools, said the Sikh Coalition’s law and policy director, Arjun Singh.

“The bullying of Sikh children is an epidemic,” he said noting that the Coalition’s 2014 national bullying report found that 67 percent of turbaned Sikh children have been bullied.

IANS