Bullying is repeated aggression against another person that is intentional. The repeated aggression can either be direct or relational with the intent of damaging friendships and relationships. Youths, adults, male or female can enforce the bullying. Bullying is involved around the world. While the bullies can see it as “being funny,” the victims and others can see it as getting their feelings hurt emotionally and physically. People can also bully other people on the internet, which is called cyberbullying. Cyberbullying would be an example of indirect bullying. Victims and other children both bully other kids and are victims to bullying. Being bullied or bullying others is a somewhat common experience we all face in childhood and into our teenage years of life. Bullying is a very serious issue in schools, for parents, social media, and the public. There is growing awareness of the problem of bullying, which may lead some to believe that bullying is increasing.
“Most school-aged children are exposed to bullying in some form due to the unequal balance of power and influence that is so common in youth relationships and peer groups. Research shows that bullying and harassment in schools increases in late childhood and peaks in early adolescence, specifically during middle school and typically takes place in unstructured settings such as the cafeteria, hallways, and playground during recess.” It still remains a prevalent and serious problem in today’s schools. Victims of childhood bullying including the bullies themselves were at an increased risk of poor health, decreased wealth and less positive social relationship outcomes in adulthood.
Even after the bullying was brought under control the participants experienced numerous family hardships and some even suffered from psychiatric disorders. Children who are bullied can potentially have risky or illegal behavior, decreased wealth and negative social issues when they turn into adults. While bullying creates risks of health and social problems in childhood, it is still unclear if this risk extends into adulthood or not. Children who are physically weak, often won’t stand up for themselves, have poor social understanding of what is going on to them, have few if any friends and are more likely to become bully victims at school and even out of school. The bullies are typically above average size, strong, healthy children. They are good at recognizing reactions, emotions and social understanding while also being good at manipulating other people.
Bullies are either typically well-liked or disliked by their peers and other people in school. Bullies likely come from broken families, disturbed families and have strange behaviors, but usually they aren’t emotionally troubled. The actual bullies were not at a risk of poor adult outcomes before they decided to act out their bullying behavior.. Parents can have an impact on preventing their child from getting bullied. Parents need to have frequent and consistent conversations with their kids on how to treat others and to have a good attitude and positive behavior.
Kids of abusive parents are often the targets for bullies. “The effects of these types of poor parenting were stronger among children who were bullied and also bullied others (bully-victims) than among those who were bullied but did not bully others. The review also found that abusive parenting or harsh parenting was associated with a moderate increase in the risk of children being bully-victims and a small increase in their risk of being a victim of bullying. Warm but firm parenting reduced children’s risk of being bullied, the investigators noted”
According to StopBullying.gov, between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 students say they have been bullied at school. About 20% of students in high school have been bullied. About 28% have experienced bullying in middle school. Most bullying happens in the middle school years. The most common types of bullying are verbal and social bullying. Approximately 30% of young people admit to bullying others in surveys. About 70.6% of young people say they have seen bullying in their schools. 70.4% of school staff have seen bullying. 62% witnessed bullying two or more times in the last month and 41% witnessed bullying once a week or more. When bystanders intervene, bullying stops within 10 seconds 57% of the time. 9% of students in grades 6–12 experienced cyberbullying. 15% of high school students were electronically bullied in the past year. An unfortunate statistic is, 55.2% of LGBTQ students heve experienced cyberbullying.
The use of social media helps us spread the word to the whole nation about how bullying is wrong and to make people aware of the widespread problem. Social media has done a good job lately on spreading the word about anti-bullying and what people can do to help stop bullying. The top five anti-bullying pages on social media are: Bullying_org on Twitter, Prevnet on Twitter, KidsHelpPhone on Twitter, Be Bold: Stop Bullying on Facebook, and Erase Bullying BC. All of these profiles/pages have thousands of likes or followers. It’s important for the anti-bullying movement to keep people informed about changes to anti-bullying legislation, strategies to help eliminate bullying, new resources and interesting campaigns and initiatives that are going on all year round that are meant to maintain the momentum and awareness that is required to put a stop to all bullying once and for all.
Bullying is one of the most destructive behaviors that affects our youth today. Due to it’s severe social destructiveness, eliminating bullying has become a national priority. Many programs and national initiatives have been started and have been implemented in schools and communities to tackle the problem of bullying. “In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and The Department of Education released the first federal uniform definition of bullying for research and surveillance. The core elements of the definition include: unwanted aggressive behavior; observed or perceived power imbalance; and repetition of behaviors or high likelihood of repetition.”
There are many different modes and types of bullying. The definition outlines two main types of bullying and four different modes, they are direct and indirect, and the different modes are verbal, relational, physical and destruction of property. Most instances of bullying can be categorized types and modes or a combination of them. Some severe forms of bullying can be criminal and some of these categories are hazing, harassment and assault. Sometimes the word bullying can be misused. For example you may see a fight between two people on the news described as bullying.
Just because two people have a physical altercation does not mean that bullying was a factor. Now that people know how destructive can be, people are constantly looking for new strategies to help combat the problem ane reverse the negative behavior and it’s often serious consequences.Bullying is not good human behavior and people should never bully anyone because it can severely hurt them and cause permanent physical and emotional damage. It can hurt someone emotionally, physically and psychologically. Students in school desperately want to fit in with other students and they can’t fit in if they are picked on constantly and singled out.
Kids that are bullied develop low self esteem, low self confidence and feelings of a low self worth, some of the other effects on people being bullied are: anxiety, depression, health problems, poor grades in school, social withdrawal, and sometimes even suicidal thoughts or worse they might have suicidal thoughts or attempt to commit suicide. There is a history of people who took their lives because the bullying they encountered was too much and they didn’t know how to make it stop or fight back. Victims of bullying are likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, start more fights at school, damage property, drop out school, and express abusive behavior towards loved ones.