Bullying and Cyberbullying in Middle and High School

Most people have had those presentations on how we should stop bullying and stand up to it. Even though there many protective measures that teachers take, there are still some people who somehow manage to bully outside and inside of school and never be caught. According to NoBullying.com, “Approximately, 160,000 teens skip school every day because they are bullied, and 1 in 10 teens drop out of school due to repeated bullying. Eighty-three percent of girls, and 79 percent of boys report being bullied either in school or online.”

In an interview with a few students in our school who had been bullied or had seen a bully, one student, who requested anonymity, said he had been bullied by an older kid. He said, “I wanted to stay home every day because I was so scared of him.”

The bully stopped after the victim reported this issue to the teacher, but the bullying action caused the victim to have psychological fear for a long time. Other students saw some bullying happen in our school and they were angry about the bullying, but they were afraid to do anything about it. One student said, “I was too scared to do anything about the bully because I was afraid that he would start to bully me if I stood up to him.”

According to the website Scribd the World’s Digital Library, research shows that bullying, both face-to-face and online, is more common among 6th-8th graders than high school students.

There are many manifestations of bullying: verbal bullying about race, religion, physical looks, sexual comments and gestures, and also cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is bullying that involves electronic technology and takes place on the Internet, which includes: social media sites, text messages, chat, and other websites.

Cyberbullying can be much worse than normal face-to-face bullying in many ways. Some examples are: 1. Cyberbullying is broadcasted to a very wide audience and can be very difficult to trace because the posts can be anonymous. 2. Cyberbullying can happen any time whether during the day, night, or even 24/7. 3. Deleting the post or text is incredibly difficult because it is broadcasted to a vast number of people who all have access to it. Cyberbullying also has many similar effects to normal bullying, such as: skipping school, depression, using alcohol and drugs, having lower self esteem, and receiving poor grades. Both bullies and their victims indicate that they need help from families and schools.

Research also showed that bullies have long lasting aggressive behavior and victims are usually lonelier than their peers. A survey on the website said that one-third of students have either been bullied or have been a bully and 3.2 million students are victims of bullying each year.

Here is an example of bullying/cyberbullying according to www.ryanpatrickhalligan.org:

Ryan Halligan was a student who attended a middle school in Essex Junction, Vermont. He had been bullied since 5th grade by one kid and his group of friends for being academically weak and having poor physical coordination. But since he was only being bullied by words, Ryan’s parent told him to ignore them, walk away, and remember that he had good friends to count on. So by the end of 5th grade, Ryan seemed to be doing just fine. When Ryan went to middle school, the bullying started up again. Ryan’s parents didn’t think much of it because they thought that it was natural for kids to pick on other kids at this age. But they didn’t realize that Ryan had bottled up a lot of his bad experiences until he a complete meltdown one night in December of 2002. Ryan’s dad had decided that they had had enough of this bully and so they agreed that Ryan should learn how to defend himself in case this bully came back again. Ryan’s parents got a call from the vice principal in February 2003 after he broke up a fight between Ryan and the bully. Ryan was quite happy about fighting with the bully and the bully hadn’t messed with Ryan for a while. The bully actually later became a friend of Ryan and so Ryan decided to tell his new friend an embarrassing and funny story that happened to him once. The bully ran off with the story of Ryan having something done to him which made everyone think that he must be gay. This erupted into a volcano of teasing and taunting which continued to the day of Ryan’s death.

In the summer of 2003, Ryan was trying to build a relationship online with a girl and when they returned back to school in the fall he approached her in person. His mom wrote, “In front of her friends she told him he was just a loser and that she did not want anything to do with him. She said she was only joking around with him online. He found out that her friends and her thought it would be funny to make him think she liked him and to get him to share a lot of personal, embarrassing stuff. She then copied and pasted their private IM exchanges into ones with her friends. They all had a good laugh at Ryan’s expense.” Seeing that Ryan was already being bullied, now he had to deal with the large audience on the internet seeing the things that he had said to this girl. Ryan couldn’t take it anymore so on October 7, 2003 Ryan committed suicide.

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