FACEBOOK SITE "KICK GINGER DAY"

Newsletter sent home today by Kamloops - Thompson School District Superintendent Terry Grieves. Please read over and discuss with your child.

From Canada.com where perspectives connect. Webpage address at bottom.

RCMP investigating Facebook group over 'Kick a Ginger' day

Catherine Rolfsen and Mike Barber , Canwest News Service

Published: Thursday, November 20, 2008

"They say blonds have more fun, but it was redheads who might have got a bigger kick on Thursday, dubbed by some as Kick a Ginger Day.

Across the country, school boards had to contend with a joke from an episode of the satirical animated show South Park that has spiralled into a day of promoting violence.

RCMP in B.C. are investigating the 14-year-old administrator of a Facebook group called "National Kick a Ginger Day, are you going to do it?"

The Vancouver Island boy said the group, which had nearly 5,000 members from across Canada and internationally, was only a joke and he is sorry.

The page, which urges members to "get them steel toes ready," had garnered hundreds of messages. Many were from people claiming to have already kicked redheads that day; others expressed outrage.

The page's teenage administrator said he didn't make the group, but inherited it after its original creator got in trouble.

"It was a joke," he said. "I'll message everybody and say I'm sorry that this offended people."

Comox Valley RCMP Const. Tammy Douglas said the group is being investigated and those involved could face charges.

"We do treat this sort of thing seriously," she said. "This is sort of inciting hate. It's a hate crime really."

Ironically, the day falls in the middle of the international Bullying Awareness Week.

....

n the episode of South Park in question, Ginger Kids, one character - Eric Cartman - begins a campaign against red heads, calling them soulless and inherently evil.

Brenda Morrison, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., said she was "shocked" to find out about the day.

Morrison, who has written extensively on bullying, said social networking websites such as Facebook or MySpace provide conduits that make bullying in school much easier, as they allow for information to be spread rapidly and with little supervision from adults or authorities.

"Anything that legitimizes (bullying), we should take care to control, as a community, as caring adults," she said, noting that her husband and son are redheads. "

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=49022ee5-66d1-46e0-a057-7707de6e140b