Tired of bearing witness to young kids getting bullied, entrepreneur and YouTuber Matthew Bandeira decided it was time to conduct his own social experiment, by shedding light on something that affects kids of all ages and locations.
He gathered a group of three older kids, and one younger one with a soccer ball to hit the streets with a simple task – to pit the three “bullies” against the smaller boy by stealing the ball while hanging back to see what happens next.
The way it goes down is like this: the younger boy is seen minding his own business sitting on a bench with his backpack and soccer ball beside him. The older boys show up, tossing his pack and saying things like, “That’s a nice backpack you got there…” and “Aww….sit back down….”
A mom, sitting down on the other side of the bench, immediately takes note of what’s happening around her and gets up to intercede, saying, “That’s not playing.” She puts the boys in their place, and as a way to defuse the situation, she uses her son as an example to relieve the boy of embarrassment. This is the first of three isolated incidences in the video.
The entire video is meant as an awareness campaign, stating that 28% of students ages 12-18 report being bullied at school during the school year, prompting both the onlookers in the video and viewers of the video to question whether they’d step up and do something. The end of the video asks the bully-stoppers why they put a halt to the bullying, and asking them how they felt about the social experiment overall.
Click below to see how the whole thing went down.
