Yesterday was my lucky day. I had the honour of receiving a lovely, passionate ‘courtship’ message in my Facebook’s inbox.

It was from a man in his late forties who claims to have lost his wife two years ago.

He said that she died in a traffic accident and left him a young daughter to take care of.

The poor guy is now looking for his dream woman; a woman who has the fear of God in her.

And for some reason, he thinks that I’m that woman!

I checked his profile and decided that it was fake, so I just pasted his private message on my Facebook wall and enjoyed a few laughs with my friends.

Should the guy persist with his attentions, I will block him, and should that not be enough, I know exactly where to find the police cyber unit.

But imagine had this sort of thing NOT happened through an online medium. Imagine had the guy used traditional means like a letter in the post?

Brrrr… scary right?

Some years ago, my partner and I received an anonymous letter in our letter box. It was four pages long, painstakingly hand-written and, to top it all off, it was also hand-delivered.

The author/s claimed to have been walking through our locality whilst looking for a place to buy, and by chance, they noticed two surnames on our doorbell.

Apparently this was enough to trigger a series of events more fit for fiction than reality - upon seeing our two surnames on the doorbell label, they rushed home, wrote a long letter full of abuse and threats, and then returned to the scene of the crime to post it by hand.

In the letter they claimed to be messengers of God, and because they automatically assumed that we were living in sin (because apparently that’s the only thing two surnames on a door bell could possibly mean), they threatened us with eternal damnation, a special place in hell, and vicious monsters under our bed.

The thought that such people knew where we lived and having been so close to us, gave us the creeps. At first we suspected that they might have been neighbours, but since we had been living there for years, we couldn’t fathom why neighbours were objecting now.

Unfortunately there was nothing we could do but live in doubt. We knew that the chances of the police tracking down an anonymous letter were close to zilch, so we were left grinding our teeth in anger, feeling invaded and absolutely frustrated… until I decided to go public.

Convinced that the authors’ intention was to intimidate us, I did the exact opposite of what they would have expected. Instead of hiding and feeling like outcasts, we published the letter on Facebook and on Times of Malta.

Within minutes, my inbox was lighting up like a Christmas tree.

People from all over Malta were sending me messages to tell me that they too had received a similar letter, with exactly the same words, same handwriting and the same daunting messages. People from Marsaskala to Rabat, from Birzebbugia to Sliema, finally felt much better because they found out that they were not the only victims of such ridiculous bullies.

The point of all this is simple - exposing bullies is essential to beating them to it.

Exposure is where the battle starts, and because bullies tend to be cowards, that’s also where it tends to end.

So wherever you are, whoever you are, whatever type of bullying you might be confronting, never hide, shout out loud, bring it to everyone’s attention.

Never protect a bully.