The furore over the blackberry scene in the recent Peter Rabbit film (when blackberry allergic Mr McGregor was attacked by the rabbits with blackberries) certainly raised awareness of how food allergens can become a dangerous weapon in the hands of bullies.
Grabbing the opportunity the publicity has offered, Karen Woodford at the Safer Eating Company has launched a petition which she hopes will not only keep the issue alive but will help pull together some much needed data on the extent of allergy bullying.
If more data were available we would be in a much better position to require the police and the government to treat allergy bullying as the crime that it is: a peanut or a meringue forced into the mouth of someone who was anaphylactic to peanut or to egg could could kill them just surely as a knife thrust up through their ribs.
All we know right now is that there are around 11 million children in the UK, approximately 2% of whom have a nut allergy: 220,00 children. There is little in the way of UK figures but this US survey suggests that 40% of children/parents of allergy children have been bullied – which equates to 88,000 children in the UK who may have been allergy bullied. And there is one case currently going through the courts in the UK of 13 year-old who died, quite possibly died as a result of allergy bullying.
What we need are more statistics. We need the police to treat allergy bullying as a serious crime and to record incidents of it so that we can have some understand of the scale of the problem. With these figures we can then press the government to ensure that both the police and schools have the powers to treat allergy bullying as the crime that it genuinely is.
Meanwhile, we need to raise awareness amongst the non-allergic population of how serious allergy bullying can be.
As part of their campaign, Safer Eating is running a blog post by multi allergic Rory Mason illustrating all too clearly the dangers of ignorance – see Pelted with peanuts… with friends like these, hey?
But the first thing is to raise awareness– and who better to do that than the allergy community.
Karen’s petition is already up on Change.org. We all know how powerful these petitions can be so let’s get it some serious numbers.
Please, everyone, blog about it, Facebook it (Safer Eating), Instagram it (@safereatingco), Tweet about it (#AllergyBullying) , talk about it, write about it. Let’s not waste the awareness raised (thank you Sony pictures) by the now infamous Peter Rabbit film.
Allergy bullying
Not food related but I am severely allergic to dogs as well as to many foods. A dog sat on my smart black jacket in a public place I said to the person I was with Oh I’m going to have to wash my jacket now. The dog owner grabbed my jacket rubbed it all over the dog to get as many hairs on it as possible and flung it in my face saying I hope you f-ing die bitch. I reported it to the police. We have to stand up against allergy hate crime!
While you can sort of understand – although certainly not condone – why allergy-unaware children might want to make a peanut aware child touch a peanut ‘to see what happens’ – what on earth can motivate that kind of behaviour? Sad… What sort of reaction did you get from then police?
They took it quite seriously because I did! We managed to get hold of CCTV footage of the incident and took it in to the police. I had a message to say that they had had words with the man who did this and told him to stay away from me and keep his Staffordshire Bull terrier away from me too. The incident made me frightened to go out and gave me nightmares. It involved me going back and forth to the police station, describing the event and then back again to make an official statement . I was told I might have to identify him in a line up and might have to go to court. Viewing the CCTV with the police officer and reliving it in full technicolour was not a pleasant experience. My jacket had a heavy bunch of keys in the pocket which struck me in the chest when he flung it at me, at a site where I suffer the pain of costochondritis. Where the dog hairs hit my face my face swelled with angioedema. This all happened on a day when I had been to the funeral of a very close friend that morning. This happened at the venue where I was attending the wake after the funeral, in front of a group of middle aged ladies and gentlemen all dressed in black and clearly part of a funeral gathering. Not wanting to cause an upset to the other mourners, I excused myself and went outside into the November rain ( now not able to wear my dog hair covered jacket). I went into shock and started crying and shaking. I decided to go straight to the police station only to find that there is no public access to the police station. There is a police desk at the council offices but due to cuts the police desk closes at 5 p.m.! and this was 6 p.m. This is in a town of 60 thousand people. I felt very vulnerable and unsupported at that point. Then quite by chance a young PC came along and found me crying and shaking in the rain . He asked me what was wrong, made some basic notes and someone rang next day to give a crime number. It took effort to pursue this, and was difficult at a time when I was grieving for the loss of my friend, but I was doing it for all of us that suffer with allergies. For all he new his wish for me to die could have come true, if I hadn’t had antihistamines, asthma inhalers etc with me. He was weaponising his dog, to someone who has severe allergies an allergen is as dangerous as a knife. Allergy hate crime needs to be taken very seriously.
What a horrendous experience, Julie. And at such time. But thank you for pursuing it with the police – at least that particular police station will now be allergy aware. Was any action taken against the guy?
Wow I am so sorry. That must have been a horrible and frightening experience for you. You were very brave.