I just had an awesome idea for a business, and it sort of came to me in a dream.

I dreamed that me and two other people were going to go scare the crap out of some little thug who had bullied a kid we knew and destroyed the kid’s backpack. What’s worse, the bully had been taking food off his victim’s lunch tray for weeks.

So we decided to stage a little intervention, put a real scare into the little shit, and hopefully get the money to pay for his victim’s new backpack plus all the food he stole out of the bully.

Yeah, this is clearly illegal and a terrible idea in reality, but hey, dream.

However, when I woke up from my nap and the events of the dream were floating around in the as yet unset Jello of my mind, I suddenly realized that there was the germ of a great idea in there.

Imagine this ad :

Is your child being bullied in school? Is the school refusing to do what it takes to protect your child? Are you at your wit’s end trying to protect your child? Is your child afraid to go to school?

Then call Bullyguard. We will assign a trained professional to protect your child. Our professionals are adults trained in both child care and self defense. They will walk your child to and from school (or accompany them on the bus), and stay with the child all day, protecting them between classes and during lunch and recess as well.

This acts as a strong deterrent to anyone looking to harm your child. Most of the time, this deterrent alone is enough to keep your child safe.

But don’t worry… in case a physical intervention is required, our professional Bullyguards are highly trained in stopping schoolyard violence without any harm to any child.

So call Bullyguard. We step in where the school system fails.

We can keep your child safe.

Would that not kick ass? Ideally, this would be a volunteer service and therefore free to any parent who needs it, but I am realistic enough to know that to provide such a service would probably be expensive and it might just have to be a not-for-profit instead.

It would be hard to get enough people to be willing to stick with a kid throughout the entire school day without offering them some kind of financial compensation. Even with all the adults who were bullied as children as potential volunteers.

And it goes (almost) without saying that these people would have to be highly trained and extremely disciplined. The job is not to take revenge on the bullies that tormented you as a child and it would be absolutely unacceptable for them to strike or otherwise seriously injure a child in the call of duty, no matter how much the little cretins might deserve it.

The priority is protection, not schoolyard justice. Keep the child safe.

And honestly, if you are an adult of average size and strength should be able to easily restrain a child without harming them.

Also, every child would be given a standard lecture at the beginning about how this is not a license to be obnoxious and mean to other children, knowing they cannot retaliate.

If the kid gets too obnoxious, their Bullyguard would simply walk away (after giving them many warnings, of course) and then they would be left to deal with the consequences.

This would only be in extreme situations where the client child is completely out of control, of course. Essentially, when the client child becomes a bully themselves. The goal of Bullyguard is to end bullying, not end up protecting it.

Now, I am not sure what the legal picture would be for such a service. It is not impossible that schools, quite irrationally, would resent the implied rebuke of the presence of a Bullyguard, and would look for legal reasons to get rid of them.

And there are laws keeping adults away from schools and children, although those are mostly targeted at known sex offenders. But it is not impossible that a school would put in a policy that no adults that are not parents of children are allowed on school grounds, period.

You know, for the kids’ “safety”.

So our Bullyguards would have to be bonded and with full background checks and all that can possibly be done to assure parents they are safe around kids.

Even then, it would be likely there would be some schools that just would not allow them, and the service just plain would not be available there. There would be no way to legally force a school to allow the service there, although the Bullyguard organization could certainly advocate to be allowed access at every available venue, and accuse schools that will not allow it in of being “soft on bullying” and even, should it come to this, a “haven for bullies” or “the bully’s favorite school”.

The other legal angle to worry about would angry parents of bullies trying to sue you because one of your Bullyguards dared lay a hand on their precious little snowflake, no matter how gently.

I think the best angle of defense on that would be if Bullyguards all had lapel cameras that documented everything they did, and therefore have legal evidence of both the bullying and the response to show in court, should the need arise.

The bully’s parents would probably not want the whole world to see what a little shit their kid has been, let alone trying to plead their case in front of a jury or a judge with such clear evidence.

No uploading videos to YouTube, though. As bad as bullies are, you do not want to tar the kid for life.

They DO grow out of it, most of the time.

So what do you think? I think it would be a highly valuable service, and be a very strong force towards ending bullying once and for all.