Introduction
Imagine coming home from a long day at the office to see your child covered in bruises, scratches, and tears. When you ask him what happened, he responds with a lie stating he fell off his bicycle, but somehow you know that wasn’t what caused his injuries. The next few days you drop your child off at school and he seems more upset than usual. You keep asking him if he is being bullied but he keeps playing it off as accidents. Finally, your child tells you he is being bullied by another student in school, and suddenly your child becomes a statistic. He has just become one of the children in the 22% of children that are bullied in school (New Data Show a Decline in School-Based Bullying 1).
In-school bullying is a social epidemic that has been occurring since before anyone can remember. Bullying has led to suicides, mass shootings, and number of Anti-Bullying campaigns. Research shows that bullying makes students more likely to “struggle in school and skip class,” as well as put them at higher risk of suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse (1). How will you prevent yourself from becoming a statistic?
History
Bullying is an issue that has been present since before recorded history. Bullying is the “deliberate intention to harm another individual” (Allanson et al. 32).There are examples of bullying in the Bible, from Cain and Abel, to David and Goliath, as well as the story of the Good Samaritan (1). Bullying is an epidemic without a cure, one that will thrive forever.
In 1979, Usenet, a “worldwide communication connection,” was created. With this software, a person was affiliated with their school and could post and read messages, like all social media today. This created a new frontier to bullying known as Cyber Bullying (Squires 1). This allowed more students to bully others because this way was an indirect form of agitation. Following this creation, My Space, Twitter, and other forms of social media still used today came into existence. Shortly after came the invention of the smart phone in the year 1993 (Sarwar and Soomro 217). This now mobilized this disease labeled bullying that has been proven deadly. Over time bullying has remained the same, changing forms depending on its host, and occasionally finding a new frontier to dwell in. There must be an end to it, but where?
Effects on Society
Bullying in schools has not just an impact on the victims of bullying, but also an impact on the parents of students who are being bullied. Schools have shown to be effected by bullying within their walls. Therefore, bullying has an impact on more than just the victims of bullying.
When a child returns home from school and informs their parents that they are being bullied, the parents are taken aback. Bullying can take multiple forms such as, exclusions from friend groups, “physical alterations, and spreading rumors,” so when a parent discovers their child to be a victim of bullying, they can physically become sick (Shires 1). Bullying causes people to feel inferior and unlike themselves in every sense. With a feeling of inferiority comes insecurity and a feeling of having low self-worth. This can lead to students refusing to attend school because they do not want to face the person who is tormenting them. When this happens, a parent would begin to worry about their child, wondering what they were doing wrong, or why their child would not tell them about being bullied. Continuous worry leads to an increased level of stress which can lead to more devastating health problems like ulcers (1). If the situation worsens, some students regrettably have become suicidal. This has the ultimate effect on a parent: to discover that their baby, their sweet, innocent child, has taken their own life because of a bully, is unimaginable. Parents can also become obsessed with the bullying situation, leading to more health problems (1). In order to prevent bullying from taking over a child’s life, the most important things is for parents to communicate with their children. Communication allows students to talk about how they are feeling while the situation is occurring, and also allows parents to comfort their children and feel more at ease since they will know exactly how their student is feeling.
Schools are also affected by bullying. When schools have a large amount of bullying occurring, it looks bad on the faculty and the district. The community tends to start thinking that if there is a high percentage of students being bullied, the teachers are not paying attention and are not aware of what is going on inside of their facility. Due to school bullying, there have been many campaigns inflicted in an attempt to prevent bullying, or at least lessen the frequency of it occurring. School districts have also become “No Bully Zones,” meaning they will not tolerate any forms of bullying, be it name-calling, or physical aggression.
Ultimately, bullying effects everyone involved in the life of the student that is being bullied. Parents suffer along with their child, schools feel the wrath of a parents concern and implement policy, and the community feels the pain of losing a child to such a deadly epidemic.
Examples
Bullying happens at every school, in all age groups, and in different ways. In junior high and high school, bullying is more likely to occur over social media because of the access to electronics. In younger levels of schooling, the most likely way bullying occurs is teasing and exclusion. While all bullying is considered awful, there are some accounts of it that are worse than others.
One of the accounts of bullying recorded that is considered small to society, takes place in the sixties where a young girl named Stacy was the victim of tormenting from a boy she thought she trusted from the neighborhood (“Short Stories About Bullying”). She had a hearing problem that led to her needing to wear hearing aids. One day while she was walking down the street, a boy from her neighborhood came along and began messing with the device on her chest that changed the volume (1). He messed with the device so much that it sent a high pitch sound to her ears and hurt her (1). Later on, it was discovered that this was not the first time someone had purposely hurt Stacy (1). After her parents heard about the encounter, they decided to move away from the little town in Missouri because they could not understand why people could be so cruel to such an innocent young girl (1). While this account was seen as small to society, it was a not so small to Stacy and her family. Bullying can be prevented if people just have empathy and treat everyone with the same kindness they wish to receive.
The boy whose name was never mentioned in the article about this example of a large scale bullying account, was only nine years old when he fell victim to brutal beatings, taunting, and sexual assault, by other elementary age students (Wood 1). The boy was a transfer student at a school in West Philadelphia (1). It is common for new students to be teased or picked on at a new school until they find their friend group, but for this young boy, the teasing escalated quickly into brutal bullying. The kids who bullied him started by insulting him, questioning his masculinity (1). They progressed to “body checks in the hallways, beatings after school, forcing the boy to watch homosexual pornography and coercing him to simulate sex by ‘humping’ the school flagpole while the schoolmates laughed at him” (1). This bullying was already at a level that was going to be difficult for this innocent boy to forget about, however the tormentors had new plans to ruin this child fourth grade year. One dreadful day the bullies trapped the victim in the bathroom, and while two boys held him down, the other pulled his pants down and attempted to sexually assault him (1). All that may have saved him was the sound of a teachers footsteps approaching the bathroom (1). What followed this horrific event is the ending note to this terrible experience. The boys threatened the young victim to “blow his brains out,” if he told anyone about what he had just undergone (1). In the months following these events, the boy attempted to commit suicide multiple times, tried to reenact the sexual assault on a family member, and became a completely different person (1). This endeavor was something no child, nor any person should endure. Bullying is very common and has led to the increased rate of teen suicides. This account of bullying that largely impacted the school and community it took place in was a horrific event and goes to show that bullying really is killing people in society today.
Bullying in schools is an increasing social epidemic that needs to be remediated. It is society as a whole’s responsibility to put a stop to something that has hurt many and helped few, therefore, the world must come together to learn how to treat others and stop bullying in its tracks.
Solutions
Bullying is one of the social epidemics that does not have a solution that will permanently end the terror it causes. Because bullying is a part of every person’s life, there is no chance at ending it; however, there are different ways people can prevent it from occurring, thus lessening the chances of bullying.
“The best way to address bullying is to stop it before it starts” (“Prevention at School” 1). First of all, students need to be educated to recognize bullying and its different forms. Schools can host interventions in libraries, presenting research found about bullying and how to treat it (1). Schools can offer role play activities, discussions about reporting bullying, creative writing opportunities, and even creative art expressing the effects of bullying (1). All of these things will have an impact on students temporarily, but the feelings of hatred towards bullying will fade away. The only way for bullying to be fully extinguished from the face of the earth would be to rid emotions from all people, but that is not possible or realistic. Bullying is always going to be around, but there will always be a way to prevent it from reaching extremes.
Governments around the world have most of the power in their countries; therefore, they have the most influence to the people under them. This is why legislation would be the best way to prevent bullying. Majority of people follow the law, may that not be every single law that has been created, but any of the ones that put people’s lives at risk. Bullying in schools has led to teen suicide throughout the world. The bullies’ taunting, beating, or cyber abuse are the weapons used to injure the victims until some of them find the only option to escape their torment to be death. The penalties that should be inflicted upon the legally reported bully should be community service, fines, and then jail time, all depending on intensity of the bullying situation. While there should be legislation that states that intentional bullying should be illegal, it may never happen. Some people find what someone says to them to be bullying, while that other person has no idea they are being considered a bully. Bullying is something easily done, not always intentionally. This is why there should be legislation preventing cyber abuse, punishing physical abuse, and helping solve the problem of bullying once and for all.
Camus and Absurdity
Albert Camus had a belief that the real question in life wasn’t what the meaning of life was, but “that [it] is suicide” (Aronson 1). Camus believed that people must decide whether or not life was worth living through (1). His beliefs relate perfectly to the social epidemic of bullying in schools. Bullying makes students question themselves, change themselves, and wonder why they should even be alive at all. It makes them go on a soul-searching journey to find themselves, but some turn to Camus’ ideals. They believe suicide is the only answer to the philosophical problem they are dealing with. Camus would feel that bullying was another absurd, or pointless act of people trying to find their purpose in life by endlessly bullying people over and over again. They make themselves feel better by bullying, feel bad about themselves again, and then build themselves back up by bullying more and more. He would find it pointless and see it as a way for people to fill the emptiness inside of them. Since there is no solution to bullying in schools, Camus would feel similarly as he had towards hearing of the epidemic. He would have expected there to be no solution because he theorized that life was an endless cycle of absurdity (1).
Conclusion
Bullying in schools is an epidemic that will continue to spread and worsen if nothing is done to prevent it from happening so frequently. Legislation and penalties for the act of bullying need to be inflicted upon bullies to help bring this terrifying action to an end. It is an epidemic that has always been present and always will be, for as Camus says, life “has no meaning” so people do pointless acts to try and find their own meaning of it (1). However, with hard work and compassion, this epidemic can become nothing more than a curable disease.
Works Cited
Allanson, Patricia, et al. “Http://Ljournal.ru/Wp-Content/Uploads/2017/03/a-2017-023.Pdf.” A History of Bullying, 2017, doi:10.18411/a-2017-023.
Aronson, Ronald. “Albert Camus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 10 Apr. 2017, plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/.
“New Data Show a Decline in School-Based Bullying.” New Data Show a Decline in School-Based Bullying | U.S. Department of Education, 15 May 2015, www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/new-data-show-decline-school-based-bullying.
“Prevention at School.” StopBullying.gov, www.stopbullying.gov/prevention/at-school/index.html.
Sarwar, Muhammad, and Tariq Soomro. “Figure 2f from: Irimia R, Gottschling M (2016) Taxonomic revision of Rochefortia Sw. (Ehretiaceae, Boraginales). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e7720. https://Doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e7720.” Impact of Smartphone's on Society, doi:10.3897/bdj.4.e7720.figure2f.
Shires, Quentin. “How Does Bullying Affect Parents?” Study.com, Study.com, study.com/academy/lesson/how-does-bullying-affect-parents.html.
“Short Stories about Bullying.” NoBullying - Bullying & CyberBullying Resources, 20 Oct. 2016, nobullying.com/short-stories-about-bullying/. Short Story 2-Stacy
Squires, David. “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Social Media: History and Different Types of Social Media.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Social Media: (But Were Too Afraid to Ask), scalar.usc.edu/works/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-social-media-but-were-too-afraid-to-ask/history-and-different-types-of-social-media.
Wood, Sam. “Lawsuit: Boy's move to new school quickly became hell - Philly.” Philly.com, Philly.com, 6 May 2014, www.philly.com/philly/news/Lawsuit_Boys_move_to_new_school_quickly_became_hell.html.
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