At the beginning of the school year, the students at our local high school spent a week of assemblies, presentations, and discussions, all on bullying.

The hallways are plastered with pledge signs and anti-bullying campaign pieces.

Earlier this year, my daughter was involved in a situation where classmates were talking poorly about her on Facebook because she had unfriended them.

The rule in our house was that I had complete access to the Facebook accounts, passwords and all.

And last year I noticed a message that she had friended someone I didn’t know, a foreign, twenty-something year old male that was friends with hundreds of teenage girls all over the county.

“Mom, it’s okay. I checked and he’s friends with a lot of girls I know.”

One of those young ladies had more than one-thousand friends, an impossible feat for a sixteen-year-old girl from Podunk.

“Mom, I remembered what you said about not friending people if I wouldn’t have a conversation with them in the grocery store. And I know that colleges and jobs are looking at everything now. So I unfriended about fifty people I don’t ever talk to.”

Needless to say, there was quite a bit of drama and pettiness that ensued, but it also brought to light the fact that one of the girl’s twenty-plus year-old boyfriends had threatened my daughter on Facebook months previously because it was rumored she had spoken ill of his girl.

I sure was thanking my lucky stars that I never had to deal with bullying.

That’s when I realized I have been a target in an entirely different form of bullying. A form of adult bullying…

Soon…