As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and intense bullying, Liesl Schoonraad is well placed to address pupils about the hazards of bullying and the impact it has on both victim and abuser.
Capetonian Schoonraad, 47, conquered adversity and – to show how far she has come – pulled a Dakota aircraft and a 10-ton truck, and has also swum from Robben Island to Cape Town, to prove that abuse survivors can lead extraordinary lives.
She is in East London this week to speak at three schools about bullying, and she says she can identify bullies in a roomful of children in a matter of minutes.
“Their responses give them away. It may be a smirk or something in their body language and when I tell them I recognise them they actually start to listen,” she said.
“Depending on the school, up to 20% of the room could be bullies and about 50% are their victims. The rest are neutral. “Bullying is rife and the impact is devastating. It can lead to self-harming and suicide.”
Although her talks go by the title “Bullying Education”, Schoonraad is opposed to the word, saying it undermines the severity of the problem.
“Bullying is a baby word. What goes on in senior primary and high schools is abuse.”
She distilled the cause to bullies picking on whatever made their victims “different”.
“It could be anything – the child’s size, their hair, the fact that a boy prefers music to rugby, a child who is a ‘geek’ or wears glasses or is gay or doesn’t have a mother. They make a child feel they are not good enough and they can do this in person or via social media.”
And, much as she encourages victims to stand up to their abusers by indicating they will no longer tolerate being bullied, she also recognises that bullies come from a place of pain and fear. “I try to let the victims know it is not they who have the problem, it’s the abuser who has the problem.
“I scratch open their wounds and they often say they don’t want to be bullies anymore.”
Schoonraad, who has been giving these talks for seven years all over SA, is the director of Strong 4 Life, but the hats she wears are many.
She is an architectural technologist, and she also studied trauma counselling and sports psychology.
“I sometimes have 40 kids lining up to speak to me after my talk.”
When she was 11 she was fully grown at 1.7m, and was bullied mercilessly at school.
Having endured sexual assault by a paedophile between the ages of four and eight added to her feelings of worthlessness and she came close to committing suicide.
But now, as a woman so strong she can literally move aeroplanes and trucks, she is an example of how differences can be turned into strengths.
“Adversity causes some to break and others to break records. I chose the latter.”..