The bullying conflict is spread across our planet however, it happens mainly in schools. Children get bullied every day for being different such as age difference, race, gender, and appearances. Bullying could lead to depression, suicide, violent behavior, and even substance abuse. We as humans should come together as a nation and fight for justice for the victims that are being deeply impacted by bullying. As of right now we are not doing enough to prevent bullying from occurring.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, bullying is an aggressively, unwanted behavior that includes “an imbalance of power and repetition”. There are three different types of bullying: verbal, social and physical. Verbal and physical bullying includes, teasing, hitting or breaking things, threatening to cause harm, and making mean or rude hand gestures. Social bullying is, spreading rumors, and embarrassing someone in public. Most of these actions are based within school hours, but also can appear anywhere (“What is Bullying?).
There are multiple common myths about victims of bullying and the bullies, “bullying will make kids tougher, bullying is a natural part of childhood, boys will be boys, ignoring bullying will make it go away” (National Bullying Prevention Center). Bullying does not make children tougher, it lowers their self-esteem and makes then do horrible things such as: committing suicide, physically hurting themselves, and even substance abuse. The only reason why bullying might be a “natural part of child hood” (National Bullying Prevention Center), is because it mainly happens during a young age when dealing with aggressive teasing. Lastly, “Ignoring bullying will make it go away” (National Bullying Prevention Center) sometimes. Even though it possibly might sound easy, it could commonly make the situation worse, by showing them a sign of weakness. Ignoring bullying does not mean you get rid of the bully, it just means that you put it off throughout the years. Instead of stopping it and correcting it, it makes the bully feel as if he/she is doing nothing wrong.
According to “BULLYING. NO WAY!”, there are three ways to think about why bullying happens which are the following: an individual perspective, social-ecological perspective, and a systemic perspective. There are multiple reasons why people bully such as, lack of self-esteem, family issues, fitting in, or even just for the pleasure. There must be a social change in order to stop bullying from happening. Aside from this, there needs to be consequences/punishments in order to get the message across the bully.
Victims who are bullied end up having a low self-esteem that leads up to committing suicide, substance abuse, and even physically hurting themselves. In “National Bullying Prevention Center” the facts states, “A meta-analysis found that students facing peer victimization are 2.2 times more likely to have suicide ideation and 2.6 times more likely to attempt suicide than students not facing victimization”. The fact that there is a limit to bullying where children want to start committing suicide, or in generally want to hurt them self in any way should be eye openers to our nation.
The school has a responsibility to make sure that the children have a safe learning environment. This is where the administrations, teachers, and councilors come in with open arms and make the kids know they are here with any trouble they are having. Also yes, the school shows the children how bullying is a horrible thing to do, but Parents as well need to step in as well and teach their kids what is wrong about bullying.
The occurrences of bullying are spread all across our nation that happens mostly in schools. Children get bullied every day for being different such as ages, race, gender, and on appearances. We need to come up with more effective systems that will help prevent it, to help prevent students from hurting themselves. Children should be able to live a bullying free life and this would be the time to take a stand against it.
