Lindsey Prato

ENG 1020

Bullying

Bullying is defined by Webster as “to treat abusively by force or coercion.”                        Many people around the world have been a victim of bullying. Bullying can happen in schools, in groups of friends, in the workplace, over the computer, or at home. Bullying can happen anywhere. This tends to be a constant problem and is getting worse. This can have serious and in some cases extreme effects on the victim and the bully. 

Bullying can be put into two categories. This can be broken down into two words, intimidation and abuse. Intimidation is to make someone timid or fearful by another person. You can be intimidated by anyone for any sort of reason. Some, will be intimidated by power or a position someone will have on a certain subject. Abuse is a  practice or custom of repetitive harm meaning verbal, physical, and emotional. The cause of intimidation has the effect of abuse. For example, if everyday a girl named Susie gets made fun of for her curly red hair the outcome will be abuse. If she walks into a classroom and a group of girls call her, “Flaming Red,” this will start to take effect on her. The first few days she might try to ignore them and go on with her studies, but soon she will start to think deeper into why they are targeting her. Susie might start to feel self conscious and try to find ways to avoid hearing this group of girls call her names. She might stop coming to class in order to ignore this problem or wear her hair up with a headband so it isn’t really noticeable she has red hair. If it really starts to bother her she might even go as far as dying her hair. Some people can only ignore the problem for so long before they start acting out. Susie will start to feel emotional and verbal abuse.

By just making one comment, Susie could feel many different kinds of abuse. She could feel verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and it might turn into physical abuse. All these three terms can all go under one category of mental abuse. Verbal abuse is using words to make fun of someone, emotional abuse is abuse by playing with someones emotions by making them upset or angry. Physical abuse is physically harming someone. These all play into mental abuse which can alter your mental state. Your mental state consists of your emotional and intellectual responses. When this state is altered it can lead to poor performance whether it be in school or grades or your personality in general. The girls in this situation want to feel complete power and control over Susie by making fun of her hair color. They will keep doing it to make sure that Susie knows that she won’t be able to come to class without hearing it. If Susie tries to ignore the problem they may take further action by writing it on her Facebook wall or telling other kids to call her “Flaming Red” too. The girls want to make it so Susie is miserable because of her hair color. In these types of situations, many say “kids will be kids.” This is completely wrong. Kids shouldn’t be brought up to make fun of others. It serves as an excuse for the kids actions. This is a way that bullies go unrecognized and even ignored because people simply believe “kids will be kids.” If Susie were to take this to a teacher and the teacher says “kids will be kids” and nothing is done to stop the girls from picking on Susie, it will have to get worse before that teacher will try and fix the problem. Basically the excuse of “kids will be kids” means that they want the situation to get worse before acting on it and putting the students mental state on the line. If Susie feels she has no help and has tried ignoring the girls and the people she trusts won’t fix the problem who is Susie going to rely on? Susie has no help about these girls and she will just have to wait until something big happens in order to get it fixed. Therefore, Susie will start to feel more emotional abuse knowing that no one is helping her.

Lets say that Susie starts not going to class and starts dropping her grades. She may start to feel depressed. If Susie starts to feel depressed she could have a lot of anxiety or it may progress to thoughts of suicide. This leads to may psychological issues for Susie that will alter her mental state even more. Even if her parents or a caregiver gets involved with the problems and the school does something Susie still suffered all of this abuse. Susie could suffer with psychological issues the rest of her life due to this on incident. 

In an article I recently read about bullying, 3 teenagers committed suicide due to bullying issues. This article was in People magazine. The one that was the most recent was Tyler Clementi’s  story.  A freshman in college ended up committing suicide because of his roommate was spying on Tyler through his webcam.  His roommate, Dharun Ravi used this device to spy on Tyler when he asked to have the dorm until midnight one night. Dharun posted on Twitter for everyone to watch during the hours of 9:30pm to 12 to see Tyler kissing a male. This was when it was streamed to most people on Rutger’s campus. A few nights after this happened Dharun twitted about it again and had multiple people watch it. When Tyler discovered this he talked to an advisor and posted a blog about how he couldn’t believe his roommate would spy on him.  Later that day after many people saw this footage of what his roommate streamed, Tyler posted a status saying “Jumping off the GW bridge. Sorry.” Most were shocked at the news of Tyler committing suicide. Also, 2 other teens, both age 13 committed suicide due to problems of their classmates picking on them and calling them names.

Bullying can happen to almost anyone, it happened to me. I was in my sophomore year of high school when I got I-M’s one night saying how mean of a person I am and how I have no friends and how I’m a loser. As the messages continued I was being called constant names and being attacked for everything I was. These girls picked on my ethnicity, my religion, my hair color, basically everything that made me who I was. They threatened to beat me up everyday and some of my teachers were afraid so I was sent out of class for weeks. I had to talk to a social worker and I was miserable. My parent’s thought I was depressed so I had to go to a social worker. I was diagnosed with severe anxiety problems.

Earlier it was mentioned that some people never recover from bullying. Some suffer with physiological problems for the rest of their lives. In Tyler’s story he chose to end his life by jumping off a bridge. In my story, I still have anxiety problems. As the semester went on and the problems lessened I started to realize that I could do something in this situation. I started to lean on other friends I knew around school from sports teams and clubs and started to get more involved in school. I started to be non stop busy and had a lot of friends. I branched out and had more friends than I’ve ever had before. I was a more confident person. I ended high school with a 3.75, a candidate on Homecoming Court, an active member of numerous clubs and having a ton of friends. This situation helped me see that I was missing out. If I would let this get to me, I would be miserable. I did a 360 degree turn around and used this situation as making me a better person. I was completely miserable for months and now I am a very confident and strong person. Some can take advantage of this situation and make a recovery while some can’t. This is a period in their life that to them will never go away. This can stay with them and make them have problems later in life with friendships and even relationships. 

Since the victim and the bully will both be effected, we’ll discuss how the bully is effected. Even though the bully is putting harm on another person, they have issues as to why they are acting like this. A person bullies to feel the power and control over someone else. They want to feel this power that they didn’t experience at some point. Normally, a bully would have been bullied previously or have had some sort of situation in their lives that has been causing them to act like that. The situation could be their parents getting divorced, a relative dying, or a devastation situation.  A bully wants to feel fulfillment of harming another person whether it be physically, mentally, or emotionally. They do this to make themselves whole or complete. Bullies can also do this to get attention that they feel they may be lacking. Having a need for attention will make them feel they need to act out in order to get others attention. A bully can have followers that they depend on to help them humiliate someone else. A few bullies could act this way due to their upbringing. Some kids who feel left out at home could take the advantage of getting attention by doing something to another person. This is another way the bully can get fulfillment. 

Bullies can also not even realize that they are hurting someone’s feelings. They could claim that they didn’t mean to make them feel upset or angry. If the bully doesn’t realize what they are saying is hurting someone else they will continue to do it. If a bullies excuse for saying something hurtful to someone is just messing around then wouldn’t everyone at one time be considered a bully? I think that answer would be yes. No one is perfect. Everyone will say something at least once in their lifetimes that will hurt someone else. So in reality everyone is or will be a bully. 

The bullies in Tyler’s situation thought this was a funny stunt and wouldn’t be taken seriously. Dharun and Wei, whose computer was used to stream the video, didn’t consider that they would get in trouble and possible be charged. Now they are being charged with harassment and trespassing. The bullies in my situation had knowledge in what they were doing. They just thought that I wouldn’t take it as seriously and wouldn’t effect me the way it did. But they were wrong. The situation had an effect on me that I will take with me for the rest of my life. The same went for Tyler. He trusted his roommate and was betrayed by him and it hurt him so much that he took his own life. 

A bully may do this in order to make them feel the way that they had. One of the girls who made fun of me had a history of feeling left out. She did this to me in order for me to feel the way she did when people stopped talking to her. This can only be in true in some situations. 

Bullies do the things they do in order to feel fulfillment or to make someone feel the way they had been treated. The victims of the bullies and the bullies both are effected by these situations. All of these problems with people lead back to psychology. Victims have psychological issues with the effects of the bully and the bully is suffering from psychological issues themselves. 

Work Cited List

1) Truong, David./Southam, Andrew. People Magazine. Tampa, FL. October 18, 2010. Vol. 74. Number 14.