Finding the straight and narrow

Bellmore-Merrick's "Bully Whisperer" helps children heal

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She calls herself the “Bully Whisperer.” Her North Bellmore office is adorned with stuffed animals and oversized pencils and pens shaped like sunflowers. One love seat, one chair and wallpaper in pink and silver complete the safe space that Dina Horowitz has created for her patients.

Twenty-five years ago, Horowitz began her career as a practicing psychotherapist and licensed school social worker with children at the elementary, middle and high school levels. Her passion to help heal children and their families began when she was 5 years old, she noted.

“My mother was an abused child when she was a little girl,” Horowitz said. “She was sexually abused and emotionally abused. She could’ve gone in two directions: She could’ve come to terms with what happened or become a nut job.” She became an alcoholic. Then, Horowitz realized, “something in me just knew I wanted to help kids and their families.”

After assisting hundreds of children and families throughout the years in grades kindergarten to 12 across Long Island, Horowitz developed the Bully Whisperer campaign to target bullying in the schools.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 13, 2014, titled “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance,” a survey completed in the United States in 2013. The report states that, nationwide, 19.6 percent of all students were bullied at school, with 23.7 percent of girls and 15.6 percent of boys reporting that they had been harassed.

“What makes my program truly unique, and truly unlike anything else, is that I’ve specifically developed a clinically therapeutic system based on my work with at-risk youth over the last 25 years,” she said. “My program revolves around the bullies, targets and bystanders.”

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