Now, the 48-year-old Genaille is an alcohol and drug counsellor in Fort Smith where he moved from Alberta last year with his wife and three children. He's helping deal with the problem of school yard bullying in the town.

News/North: How long have you been involved in social services work?

Rob Genaille: Since 1981. I worked in the penitentiary system as a native counsellor in 1981, and I worked for 14 years in the penitentiary system at the Drumheller and Bowden institutions.

N/N: What originally got you into this line of work?

RG: I saw a huge need. I come from a very, very dysfunctional family. I didn't know I had a sober family member until I sobered up myself at the age of 22. I had never met a sober family member. I saw the need and I saw the possibilities that people could change, if they had the opportunity to change. I was right on the skids for a while.... When I was sobering up, my best friend committed suicide in the next room from me. Those kinds of things happen and I thought maybe I could do something.

N/N: What saved you from that life?

RG: I got help myself. When I first started going to the AA program, I went three times a day, morning, noon and night for a year. I had it bad. It was pretty volatile. I was running with a gang in Winnipeg and I was part of that whole street culture.

N/N: When did you start drinking?

RG: Probably about 12 or 13. I was drunk the first time I ever drank, and every other time the only reason I drank was to get drunk. Some people go out to socialize. I never did that. It was drink, fight and whatever else.

N/N: What was the turning point?

RG: I walked away. I had a family and we separated. I was married with one son. I knew it was either straighten out or die. My last drunk, I was actually supposed to do a hit on a guy. Seriously. We had the revolver and everything.... It never came into being. It was just one of those things. It was to happen that night. It was almost like magic. That day, of all days, I was with this friend and he was trying to pick up these two girls, and one of them happened to be my cousin that I hadn't seen for 10 years. As it turns out, she was an AA member and she was just getting in out of the rain when we ran into them. She said, 'You're looking pretty rough,' and I was. I had long hair and my nose was broken again. It was just pretty tough. She said, 'Come over and stay at our place.' So I did. She was an AA member and took me to a group.

N/N: Do you think you would be doing community service now if you hadn't gone through all of that?

RG: I don't think so. I think there's a lot of growth through struggle and growth through pain. That gave my life purpose. It gave all that pain and all that struggle purpose. So when I look at children and I look at families struggling, I can relate to it.

N/N: How did you become involved with Community Solutions?

RG: I attended a high-risk kids workshop in the fall of last year. At the end of it, the workshop facilitator asked if there were any bullies in the crowd. Of course, stupid me, I was the only self-admitted bully there. I just sort of went from there. I'd been involved in a thing called Community Solutions before in Wetaskiwin.

N/N: Is bullying still the main concern of Community Solutions or has it broadened since the beginning?

RG: It's kind of broadened because we see bullying as indicative of other more serious underlying issues. So we're trying to find the best ways to cope with them from a community perspective....

You can control behaviour to a point, but you don't fix anything. So we've turned it back to the community again and said, 'Do you want us to fix this thing if we can? Do you want to begin to deal with some of the underlying issues?' Because they're there. It isn't only the community's fault. We've got WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), we've got all kinds of movies that portray violence as a positive thing.

Seriously, communities are up against a lot of stuff with this. So what does a community do? Does it just look at the bullying behaviour and say stop the bullying. Or do we need to address it in a more holistic, community healing kind of way?

Because it's in everybody. If you're a parent, you've been a bully. If you've ever worked for a living, at some point in time you've had to use bullying behaviour to survive.

N/N: What are the underlying problems that have to be dealt with to combat bullying?

RG: I think family of origin has a lot to do with it. It's the family structure in which you've got the male-dominated autocratic family system that says do it my way or the highway. But there are so many other things.

N/N: Is bullying worse here in Fort Smith than it is elsewhere?

RG: I don't think it is. It appears, through what we've gathered, it's sort of on the upswing, but then it is everywhere else, as well. Look at Edmonton, they just tried to institute an anti-bullying bylaw.

N/N: Do you think Community Solutions in Fort Smith could be a model for other NWT communities?

RG: That's what we were hoping for from the outset, because if it works here it could probably work elsewhere.

N/N: How do you know if Community Solutions is being successful?

RG: That's a little bit difficult. It's like having a target you can't see.... With bullying, it happens on the playground. It happens in all the schools. But we don't know how big it is, and that's part of the problem.

If you can't see what you're shooting at, you can't see if you're going to hit it. I don't think you'll ever eradicate bullying, because part of it is natural behaviour. I think all you can hope to do is lessen the severity of the violence that happens.

N/N: Would you like to see more people involved with Community Solutions or are you pleased with the number of people involved now?

RG: I think I'm pleasantly surprised. We were actually almost taken aback when people started showing up, 20 and 30 people started showing up at meetings.

That told us something, that people were ready for change.