End Bullying: Protect Our Kids Now! - Essay Sample

Introduction

Bullying has become a prevalent problem that endangers the lives of students in elementary and middle schools. The act is a power-based, redundant, and destructive behavior of students. The issue of bullying collectively affects all learners, including the victims, witnesses of the interpersonal violence, and the bullied individuals. According to Jan and Husain (2015), bullying takes a lot of forms ranging from physical and verbal assaults such as hitting, calling names, spreading false rumors, criticizing mockery, facial expressions, and disrespectful behaviors. Equally, it can involve other indirect practices such as social exclusion. In the recent past, this act has advanced to premier forms, such as sending offensive texts through social networking that is commonly known as cyberbullying. Hence, bullying being a global problem, it needs urgent mitigative measures due to the negative impacts it causes to students. As such, teachers and parents need to take the frontline in eradicating this issue from learning institutions to create a safe learning environment and climate for education among students.

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Additionally, bullying is characterized by two significant indices: age and gender differences (Piskin, 2002). As such, bullying is less among older learners as compared to junior students. The forms of bullying are also affected by age difference since physical bullying is prevalent in younger pupils, while psychological and verbal bullying is predominant in the older ones. On the other hand, according to Piskin's (2002) research, sound differences were identified amongst girls and boys in not only the type of bullying but also the frequency of exposure to the act. As such, boys indicated significantly higher rates of attachment in bullying both as victims and as offenders (Piskin, 2002). Equally, while boys get exposed to physical bullying by other boys, their counterparts usually get exposed to psychological and verbal bullying from both sexes that included spreading false rumors about them.

Additionally, Piskin's (2002) research, identified bullies as the ones who appear to possess the urge to feel in control and powerful always. As such, such individuals seem to seek satisfaction from imposing suffering and injury to other students. Also, this category of students shows little sympathy for their victims and sturdy self-esteem. The research shows that bullies come from families that apply physical punishment and empowers children to strike back as a way to counter problems (Piskin, 2002). It happens in cases where parental warmth and involvement is limited. Besides, children with bullying behaviors get violent toward adults, including parents and teachers.

On the contrary, bullying victims appear to be insecure, cautious, anxious and suffer from minimal self-esteem. Besides, a majority of them experience social rejection from colleagues. Such students are unpopular, have few friends, and rarely try to defend themselves or strike back when being bullied. Also, the victims tend to have close ties with their overprotective parents.

Of more concern are the consequences that bullying has to those involved. Bullying has been among the significant barriers in learning, which leads to negative results to both institutions and learners at large. Besides developing mental issues and physical injuries, students involved in bullying have also recorded decreased academic performances (Jan & Husain, 2015). This effect is due to the victims' bullying response that includes avoidance behaviors such as avoiding or running away from some specific places within the school and even skipping school (Jan & Husain, 2015). Equally, learners who are chronically affected by bullying tend to view school as an unfriendly and unhappy environment. As a result, they resolve to drop out of it altogether. Also, other victims might be tortured to the extent of committing suicide or suffer from chronic illness.

Therefore, to make learning institutions safer learning settings to all students irrespective of age or sex, parents and teachers need to devise mechanisms of eradicating bullying. To start with, schools have the legal and ethical obligation to create a supportive and safe environment by mitigating the impacts of bullying, aggression, and guaranteeing a healthy teaching setting. This approach will be implemented by introducing a positive attitude towards the case of bullying and the introduction of anti-bullying policies (Jan & Husain, 2015). Besides, parents should assume a significant role in analyzing their kids during their early development stages to ascertain if they lie in the side of becoming a bully or a victim of the same. Observation of moods of children, appearances, and behavior will enable parents to categorize their kids of becoming a bully or a victim (Donegan, 2012). As such, bullies can be identified through characters such as lacking compassion for others, being impulsive, and arrogant. And for the victims, they may indicate signs like being obsessed with the fear of physical injury and isolation from colleagues (Donegan, 2012). After that, parents must make it mandatory to help their children understand bullying, how it arises, and how to seek help once victimized. Moreover, frequent interrogation of kids to check if they got subjected to intimidation at any point of interaction with peers while playing and handling it, if any, will make kids acknowledge that bullying is criminal. Finally, for fearful kids, parents should encourage them to communicate and interact freely with colleagues to develop confidence.

Conclusion

In conclusion, lack of parental care and school-based measures is the leading accelerator of bullying among students. As such, the introduction of punitive approaches, including expulsion of bullying perpetrators from school and extreme discipline from parents, can help in solving the problem. Finally, schools should develop and implement bullying prevention and policies and programs to enable them to mitigate bullying.

References

Donegan, R. (2012). Bullying and cyberbullying: history, statistics, law, prevention, and analysis. The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 3(1), 33-42. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6444/a3ad646438d62d351bd645bb84b8a2469297.pdf?_ga=2.132876167.802182259.1592435149-348729767.1582984065

Jan, A., & Husain, S. (2015). Bullying in Elementary Schools: Its Causes and Effects on Students. Journal of Education and Practice, 6(19), 43-56. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1079521.pdf

Piskin, M. (2002). School bullying: Definition, Types, related factors, and strategies to prevent bullying problems. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, 2(2), 531-562. https://www.academia.edu/1265077/School_Bullying_Definition_Types_Related_Factors_and_Strategies_to_Prevent_Bullying_Problems