Bullying is an unwanted, aggressive behavior among school-aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated or has the potential to be repeated over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose. There are three types of bullying: verbal/social, physical, and cyber bullying. All of these forms of bullying should not be accepted or tolerated anywhere in school or anywhere else. Students who experience this in school should speak up and tell teachers or administrators in order to achieve justice. The school administrators should act on this issue quickly in order to not force unintended consequences.
Verbal and social bullying is usually the most common form of bullying that occurs in schools today. Bullies implement tactics such as teasing, name-calling, spreading rumors, or embarrassing someone in public. Social bullying can be proactive, or used to achieve or maintain social position, gain attention, and alleviate boredom. It can be reactive, or retaliatory, in nature in response to a perceived threat or to feelings of anger, jealousy, or betrayal. These strategies lower their peers’ self-esteem in order for them to feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, the students that are suffering from this type of abuse are less popular than the person who is bullying them. If this abuse is prolonged for a certain amount of time, it would not be long before an altercation breaks out.
Whenever social bullying starts, sometimes physical bullying follows. Physical bullying consists of hitting, spitting, tripping or pushing, taking or breaking someone’s belongings, or obscene hand gestures. Physical bullying is more likely to occur among males although females may also be perpetrators or victims of physical bullying. Bullies may have any number of reasons for bullying others, such as wanting more control over others and wanting to fit in. Bullies are often physically stronger than their victims and have friends who condone their behavior. Students who bully others, however, often have trouble with self-control, following rules, and caring for others, and are at higher risk for problems later in life, such as violence, criminal behavior, or failure in relationships or career. Students who have experienced this type of bullying can come home with bruises or cuts, often “losing” items that they took with them to school, skipping certain classes, and even worse, attempting to bring some sort of weapon to school to solve the problem themselves.
In this technological era, bullies have used social media to create a method called cyber bullying. Electronic technology includes devices and equipment such as cell phones, computers, and tablets as well as communication tools including social media sites, text messages, chat, and websites. When someone posts something on the Internet, it is there forever no matter how much an individual believes that clearing their history will get rid of that message. People who have experienced cyberbullying are more likely to use alcohol and drugs, skip school, and have low self-esteem. Students who want to have a social media page to type positive posts now have to delete their profile or go under a different name, because they are being cyberbullied.
Bullying, no matter what form it takes, is unacceptable and intolerable. This has been a consistent problem in the school environment, and teachers and administrators need to be quick-minded to end bullying before it gets out of hand. When I watch the news about a student bringing a weapon, because he or she was being bullied, I ask myself about the ubiquity of the teachers or the administrators when the student was telling them that he or she was being bullied by the same person on a consistent basis. This also applies to students where they need to speak up and tell someone that they are being bullied. Doing more of this will make school a better place for learning and making friends.
