Although the Ministry of Education (MOE) has all along made efforts to improve gender equity in Taiwanese schools, also by continually revising laws to provide stronger protection for students, bullying in connection with gender traits still exists. However, most people choose to stay on the sidelines or to put up with such behaviour for fear of retaliation. Our goal is to create an educational environment in which students can openly express their sexual orientation and express different gender traits. Therefore, we need to lay bare the bullying problem to make the general public understand that unless we resolutely oppose bullying, diversity in our society will be under threat.

For easier identification, Taiwanese schools require school uniforms to be embroidered with a student’s name but we chose offensive, hurtful nicknames instead. No matter whether someone is already a member of the workforce or still a student, they can all recognize the meaning of this visual cue at first glance. We broadened the campaign even further by letting members of the public create their own uniforms online to tell their personal bullying stories via social networks. The high degree of public participation eventually increased public trust in education reform and the entire education industry.

Domestic research shows that the more accepting of diversity groups are and the richer their interpersonal networks are the fewer bullying incidents occur. Therefore, we intended to let citizens sharing similar experiences courageously show off their labels to mobilize an anti-bullying spirit and force the debate into the open.

We had offensive names stitched onto school uniforms, emulating the Taiwanese practice of embroidering school uniforms with a student’s name, to illustrate bullying behaviour such as name calling and verbal abuse. Under the slogan “Lost and found objects waiting to be claimed” we encouraged the public to guess who the owners of these uniforms were.

We published a post titled “Help find the uniforms’ owners” on Facebook to let it spread on social networks – When eight key opinion leaders outed themselves as the owners on their own social media pages a few days later, the younger generation began to share these posts and our campaign videos, helping them to go viral. Earlier we had sent school uniforms to Internet opinion leaders and entertainers from TV and film, embroidered with the nicknames they “wore with pride”. As one after the other received their uniforms, they responded by voicing their support. We also released a uniform chatbot on Facebook which more than 10,000 Internet users used to create pictures of uniforms embroidered with the offensive names they had been called in school. This action allowed people to demonstrate their opposition and resistance against bullying by telling their own bullying stories.

More than 30 media featured the project in reports. We only spend money to buy the uniform shirts that we had embroidered and swapped resources with 70 celebrities and influencers to obtain 70 bullying stories and earned media value of nearly 300,000 Euros, ultimately reaching 8 million impressions. We successfully raised awareness about bullying among the people in Taiwan. The stance against bullying also translated into support for education policies, leading to renewed attention to and affirmation of education reform and related draft legislation under way in 2019.