Bullying and its sometimes tragic consequences have been in the news a lot lately. We asked the members of the 2010-11 Teen Team whether they or someone they know has ever been bullied or had ever bullied someone else. How did they, their teachers or parents deal with the situation? And what do they think schools could or should be doing about bullying that they are not already doing?
When Bullies Are Concerned, Parents Need to Take Action
When the subject of bullying arises, one often hears the question, “What can schools do to stop it?” However, I firmly believe that this begins at home. If children don’t have security and stability at home, they may resort to bullying.
Parents need to be aware of their child’s behavior. They also need to instill self-confidence and self-esteem in their children. Also, children must have respect for themselves as well as respect for others. If they do, they will realize the value of every individual. They will realize that no matter how rich or poor a person is, no matter how they dress or how they speak, no matter how a person looks – that person is special and deserves to be treated justly. I believe that it is the parent’s responsibility to ensure that their child has this respect.
Of course, I am not implying that parents are responsible for the actions of their children. Each person is responsible for everything they do, whether it be good or bad. However, parents are to bring up their children in a respectable and responsible way. Parents need to provide a loving home. A home where children will feel safe and secure. I understand that not every parent can bring up their children in a good neighborhood, but they must do the best they can. I also understand that children will sometimes ignore the advice of a caring parent, and that some children, despite loving parents and good home environment, may still become bullies. In this instance, all one can do is pray for that individual and help them in any way one can.
“What can schools do?” one may ask. They can only do so much. Teachers can try to guide the child, and rules can be made to punish the bully. But if a child has respect of others near to or at zero, how can one expect the bully to mend his ways? In most cases, the bully will not. Again, it is the duty of the parents to integrate in their children the respect due to all individuals. In short, parents need to teach their children respect and children need to learn it.
- Ernestina Maldonado, junior, Home Schooled
Raise Your Voice
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.” This phrase is popular among adults, who for the most part, are past their days of bullying. However, their children are not, and words do hurt.
Last year, a boy on my bus was a little larger than average, and some of the older boys began to chuck bits of paper and broken erasers at the back of his head, insulting him and making crude jokes about his mother. By the color of his ears and neck and the look in his eyes, you could see he was one part humiliated, one part angry, and one part frightened. What did these people have against him? Why wasn’t the bus driver intervening?
I remained silent, willing someone else to speak up in his defense. I certainly didn’t want to; the ringleaders of the taunting were cruel and insensitive, and I didn’t want to become a target of their pernicious remarks by speaking up to defend a boy I didn’t even know. A mix of emotions surged up inside me: shame towards myself for doing nothing, anger toward the bullies, and sadness at the capacity of spite and malice I perceived in the bullies.
When I reflect upon this memory, I wish I could go back and change the passiveness of the bus driver, the silence of other riders, and most importantly, my own taciturnity. Everyone has a right to happiness and when others attempt to deprive them of that right, someone should step in and raise their voice.
Alison Tsai, Freshman, Johnson High School
Learning environment requires safety, accountability
The silence of one’s friends is suffocating in a school of 300. From kindergarten to senior year, I was stuck with the same, unchanging group; with all the inherent grudge-holding that scale entails. My perceived ‘religious zeal’ made no strong case to my peers to lift the ban. A friend had given palm readings at her birthday party two weeks before the beginning of seventh grade. As a Christian – a minority in my Pacific Northwestern community – I was uncomfortable. The other girls were angry at my decline. When school began, I sat down at lunch to a group of smirking faces that would not respond to my greetings. In the way of the 5-year-old, I experienced the ‘silent treatment’. In my case, it stretched on for months.
However, the issue seemed contained to these individuals and myself; until the day I told our homeroom teacher about a pair of students who for weeks had taunted a boy from a disadvantaged home about his haircut. I was not given confidentiality; I found my binder with profanities scrawled along the spine several days later. A girl appeared at my locker before gym class to push me into the wall as her friends looked on. When I approached the counselor, I was told nothing could be proven, as she would not admit to it. I watched the girl cry in her own defense.
If I say I dealt with bullying with any kind of grace, I would be relaying an utter lie. I went home each day to batter the punching bag in our basement. I awaited the day any one of those girls tried to touch me again, if only to have the sensation of causing more pain than I felt. Over the months, I lost my trust in teachers and counselors and the empty promise of a ‘safe environment’ at school, as rumors spread that I would be ‘jumped’ any day now.
I told no one that I was moving to San Antonio at the year’s end. I found satisfaction in killing their pastime without explanation. But if I could have had one last word with that counselor, I would only say: open your eyes. No one is ever too young to be cruel, and literally nothing excuses bullying in the mind of the wounded. I watched a boy come to school every day with unwashed clothes, that painfully obvious homemade haircut, and the stench of his stepfather’s smoking habit on his skin to face torment by two kids with every superficial blessing to their name. With the guidance of some invisible moral compass, this boy stood upright under unfathomable pressure. He deserved protection. The educators who could not deliver it failed him in every way. Children do not learn, in the academic or moral sense, when they feel they can hurt or be hurt without repercussion. To discipline may be inconvenient. It may not be written into the contract or discussed at length in the lecture hall. But the moral fiber of a young person is tantamount to any measure of scholastic aptitude, and to fail in developing it is to fail the student altogether.
Brooke Nowakowski, Johnson High School
Reality of Bullies
I used to think that a bully was some kid like Scut Farcus, the mean redhead from the movie “A Christmas Story,” who would threaten the young innocents, puffed up in winter-wear, with knuckle sandwiches.
I haven’t heard anyone I know use the phrase “knuckle sandwich” seriously in years, because the type of bully in high schools today isn’t tall and scary in a leather jacket. She or he is subversive and can be anyone you know. People bully people they don’t know, people bully their friends, people bully both upfront and behind backs. Many teenagers will see someone and instantly whisper to their friends mean comments about how that person looks or walks, or who they are with. And there always seems to be this underground bullying within a group of friends: who is smarter, who is dating the person who just broke up with their friend, who is prettier. I know people who become cold towards a good friend because of a few points on a test, and people who will talk about their friends when trying to flirt or impress someone. For some reason, when a person wants something, the people who are normally their trusted friends suddenly become their competition. Rumors spread in hallways and over the Internet, and for no good reason everyone ends up being hurt at some time during the year. As kids we may think that the only threat to our health is someone giving us a punch in the gut after school, but in reality the attitude in which people address us, or don’t address us can instill the same fear and sickness as a towering boy with an evil glare.
– Wallis Monday, junior, Keystone School
School Bullying Policies and Self-Reliance
It is safe to say that the vast majority of people today have been bullied at some time in their lives. It is an unpleasant yet unavoidable experience that many people consider to be a normal part of childhood. However, new issues regarding bullying have recently come to light. Very extreme cases of bullying, some even resulting in suicides, have captured America’s attention. People are becoming aware of cyberbullying, which makes it easier than ever for bullies to harass their victims. The media attention that bullying is currently receiving has caused many to clamor for increased prevention measures in schools. All this should make schools more aware of the problems caused by bullying, but administrators must think carefully before changing their policies on bullying.
Schools should intervene to prevent bullying, but only when the abuse is completely out of control. A zero tolerance policy for bullying seems like the just decision, but we live in an unjust world. The truth is that there are bullies everywhere; it really is not just a kid’s problem. Kids must learn how to take care of bullying problems themselves because someday most of them will be in similar situations as adults, without anyone to protect them. If schools rush in to remedy every little problem in their students’ lives, those children will be at a disadvantage once they enter the real world, in which we all must stand on our own feet.
Elizabeth Russell, junior, Antonian College Prep
“She’s probably a terrorist who’s going to blow up this school.”
“Nah, I bet her dad is in the Mexican Mafia!”
I blushed and looked down, my hands shook and my stomach churned, heat slowly spread throughout my body. The whispers and jabs directed at me came from a group of boys from the “popular” table where I sat trying to connect with old friends. After spending 6th grade at another school, I had returned to my old school. I thought it would be easy to join my familiar friends again. Easy to jump back into my past routine. Easy to fit in. I was wrong. As the boys continued to snicker and joke around me, feelings of loneliness and despair began to circulate through my body. My throat tightened and my eyes watered. I bit my lip to keep from crying as I looked around the cafeteria. Where do I go? What should I do? I thought these were my friends, people who would talk to me and welcome me back. Now I was being completely ignored and made fun of. It turns out I wasn’t alone. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, nearly a third of all students aged 12 to 18 reported being bullied at school in 2007. This source also shows that more bullying takes place in middle school than in high school and can result in low self-esteem, isolation, and other similar traits later in life. Unfortunately, bullying exists almost everywhere, from a middle school cafeteria to a corporate office in New York City. It only takes one voice to stop a bully.
Sydney Sepulveda, junior, Alamo Heights High School
Bullying Easy to Ignore, Hard to Identify
In elementary school, everyone knew who the class bully was. It was that one kid who was just a little bigger, just a little meaner and just a little scarier than everyone else. Everyone knew how to pick him out. Everyone knew what bullying was.
But then we grew up a little. Bullying got smarter as kids got older; soon, it was hidden behind the dangerous veneer of comedy. The class bully was still bigger, meaner and scarier, but then there would be those other people. The girl in the lunch line who cackled derisively at your clumsiness. The boy who “teased” you about the way you talked or the way you looked. Sometimes, it felt like it was all in good fun. It was like you were part of the joke, so you could ignore how much it hurt.
During those horrible adolescent years in middle school, high schoolers built up an immunity to bullying. You see it, but you don’t see it. It’s so easy to look away and pretend it’s all a joke. Bullies don’t look like they used to–they look exactly like your friends, because some of them probably are your friends.
The problem with bullying in high school is that so few people, teenagers and adults included, really know what bullying is. Those who are bullied feel like they’re just overreacting, so they don’t talk about it. Teenagers need more than ineffective teachers preaching about being nice, but schools can’t change anything until students realize what’s happening.
It’s not like it was in elementary school; this isn’t a black and white issue anymore. Bullying is not invisible, so wake up and stop ignoring the abuse.
Melanie Zook, junior, Marshall High School
Not necessarily shy
Not necessarily shy, but undoubtedly quiet and reserved, this girl has become an easy target of torment for those in possession of confidence and self-assured authority. In the corner of an AP U.S. government class, she becomes constantly distressed over unnecessary comments on behalf of the others including, “Why are you always so mad?” “…this girl’s got anger problems,” and the latest one, “Have you ever been punched in the mouth for talking too much?”
Remaining quiet and without answering their sardonic yet cruel comments, she doodles images of sunflowers and daisies. At times she tends to tear up, but mostly she takes what’s coming and sucks up the pain.
Obviously such behavior isn’t quiet and reserved; others take notice, but only laugh amongst their little cliques. The teacher, supposed guardian for students, then takes part in such laughter until turning red. It is then that she breaks.
Why is there nothing being done for this helpless girl? Why is the teacher partaking in her utter humiliation?
Alejandra Casas, senior, John Jay High School
Bullying has affected every single student across the nation, be they bully, the bullied, or just a bystander. It can be deliberate, or semi-accidental, a joke taken too far or horseplay getting a bit rougher. Reasons given are usually similar; they’re gay, they’re stupid, they’re a smart ass, they’re a freak. When I was in middle school, one of my friends was bullied rather often by a group of students. He was small for his age and they’d lift him up and dump him in trashcans. After a while, they stopped bothering him, but I’d always wondered what their motive was. According to my friend, it was because they thought his voice was annoying and he was smart, but I always felt there was a deeper reasoning behind it. Now that I’m older, I’d like to posit that reason people bully others is the feeling of superiority, or rather their need to feel superior. This doesn’t apply to all bullies, but the kids who bullied my friend were from a poorer side of town than ours, and judging from what he told me, they hated school and didn’t see the reason behind going there. They were probably C and D students, while my friend was an upper middle-class, straight-A student. They bullied him to feel better about themselves and their lot in life. That is the ultimate reason behind bullying; it’s a destructive and negative way for kids, the most powerless group in America, to feel like they have power.
Luke Thacker, junior, MacArthur High School