Bullying

**Bullying**  You walk into school and everyone is pointing at you, leaning to their friends whispering or just plain laughing. You have no idea what is going on but you dont feel good. Later in the day you find out that someone, a bully has created a rumor about you so that everyone would make fun of you and alienate you from their groups and you would be left all alone in a big school. Imagine you have no friends, no one to talk to, no one to help you, no one to be on your side. Sure you can make it through one day of this but as the week goes on the bullying and rumors are progressing and getting worse. Now you feel horrible about your self, you have no self esteem and you hate school. You used to be an A+ student now ur barely making it through your classes. You have become the victim too bullying and no one should ever have to experience this. Bullying is a life changing experience that affects children and teens and sometimes ends up being more than a life changing experience and turns into a life ending experience. To help you understand bullying a little better I am going to talk about some of the effects bullying has on people, the different types of bullying and some ways we could help to control or prevent bullying. media type="youtube" key="xPboK6yWKno?version=3" height="427" width="942"

**Affects from bullying**

There are many affects from [|bullying], as you can see from this video something as simple as calling someone a loser can have a great affect on them. These kids are afraid to go to school, afraid to live, and afraid to be who they are. One affect that directly affects the students is that since they are afraid to go to school they do not go, and in turn get bad grades. That is a very bad thing that is caused by something that could be stopped and it could mess things up for these students accademically later on down the road. According to the U.S. Center for Disease control and pervention stated that everyday there are 160,000 kids who stay home from school due to the fear of going to school and being bullied. you may not have even realized how many kids are being bullied in school. I Recently conducted a survey where one of my questions was if you had ever been bullied, I was surprised to find out that 36% of the people who took my survey had been bullied sometime in their lifetime. Another affect from bullying that isnt seen untill these kids get older but is still a huge disadvantage and plays a big part in their everyday lives. One thing that happens is since they got bad grades when they were bullied they fall behind in school. Most times when the kids fall behind they continue to do bad in school and end up not living up to their full potential, and its all from something as simple as being made fun of when they were younger. I find that ridiculous that these poor kids might not be the next great teacher, doctor or police officer. Instead they are flipping burger at McDonalds or delievering you your pizza. The other issue that doesnt apear untill later down the road is that these individuals are much more likely to develop some sort of mental disorder in adulthood. Many times these kids will develop some sort of stress disorder which affects their school work even more. but more importantly it affects your everday activites. Some affects of traumatic stress disorder are, you have flashback episodes of your experiences, you could become numb to your emotions and feel as if you do not care about anything, deppression, and many people also become agravated very easily and have outbursts of anger. This is going to affect these people greatly as they try to make new friends at some point in their lives but it is going to be very difficult as no one will want to be your friend if your angry all the time. All these problems that are caused from an incident of bullying sometime in your childhood that some people say is just part of growing up or it will toughen you up. It should not be considered normal to be made fun of or picked on regularly, and even worse it should definatly not be considered normal to be injured or be threatened day in and day out. The other Major affect from bullying and to me the most disturbing part is that many of these kids who are continually bullied and tortured at school commit suicide. According to a study done by the Yale school of medicine found that victims of bullying situations are found to be two to nine times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those of kids who are not bullied. I also found it shocking to find out that over 14% of high school students have had suicidal thoughts, And 7% have attempted suicide. Think about your high school if you had 1000 students that means that 140 of them have had suicidal thoughts. 70 of the students in that high school have attempted suicide. That is an insane number and to think that just by reducing or controlling school violence these statstics could be lowered and we could save the lives of young adults and children. When I use the term bullying the first thought that comes to many people's minds is that someone is beating you up for your lunch money, or you are being made fun of for having glasses, but there are many different types of bullying. **Forms of Bullying**


 * 1)   **Physical bullying:** This is the generic form of bullying and what most people think of when they hear the word bully. This is also what is usually portrayed through the media. Physical bullying is when there is physical abuse put onto the victim. For example, The victim is punched or kicked or harmed in any physical way. 2.
 * 2)  ** Indirect Bullying: ** Indirect bullying is when you start rumors about your peers or when their is confidential information spread around the institution. For example a bully would like to spread the rumor that Jimmy likes to play with dolls because the bully knows this will cause embarasment to Jimmy and will probably alienate him from others.
 * 3)  ** Social Alienation: ** This is simmilar to the previous type of bullying but the main goal in this type of Bullying is that the bully is only trying to alienate a person from his peers on purpose. This is ussually done by pointing out flaws and spreading rumors about the victim.
 * 4)   **Intimidation:** This is a type of bullying when the bully uses fear to get what they want. the bully will threaten the victim untill the victim does whatever the bully wants.
 * 5)   **Cyberbullying:** This is the newest form of bullying and is quickly becoming the most used form of bullying because kids have access to the internet and cell phones twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Cyberbullying is when a bully sends pictures, rumors or other types of information by using cell phones or the internet. this is becoming a terrible type of bullying because the bullies message can reach an infinite ammount of people in a matter of seconds.

**What can be done to reduce and control the ammount of bullying**

There is something that can be done and everyone can have a hand in reducing the ammount of bullying that occurs.

in the article [|"Improving the school environment to reduce school violence"] written by SL, Johnson states that one thing you can do to reduce school violence is make the students feel like they are apart of something. Try to have alot of school involvment and make it so every student has something in common. Also in the same article the author stated that it was found to be true from a study that if a school had grafiti and litter the level of violence in that school was higher than a clean well kept school. so if you can keep your school clean and nice looking, then the students in a better environment will react in a less violent way more often. According to the School Crime Supplement of the National Crime Victimization Survey, found from doing many studies and tests that having security guards and adults in the hall ways of a school showed a 26% decrease in school violence and violent actions twoards peers. These are just some minor things that could be done to reduce the ammount of bullying that takes place in a school on a daily basis. If we go back to the hypothetical high school I mentioned before that had 1000 students and 140 of them had suicidal thoughts and we reduced the bullying by 26% that means we would only have 104 students who have suicidal thoughts. If you remember before I stated that 7% of those students actually attempted suicide if we reduced the bullying by 26% we could have the potential to save eight-teen lives. Sure that may not seem like very much but imagine it being your bestfriend, your son, your daughter whose life has been saved just by having some adults in the hall way and keeping the school looking nice. To me it would definatly be worth it for schools to spend a little extra money to provide a few safetys for their students and save some lives.

As you can see bullying is a horrible epidemic that plays a huge role in the everyday lives of younger kids all the way up to adults. There are many different affects from bullying that range from bad grades all the way to suicide. Although there is genearlly only one form off bullying known by most people there are six major forms of bullying that explain all sorts of differnt ways a bully can attack their victim. Cyber bullying which was explained earlier is quickly becoming the most favored form of bullying in this technical age. Thankfully there are some things that can be done to prevent bullying and reduce the ammount that takes place in your institution. It has been found that by simply having supervision in the hallways of a school the act of bullying was reduced by 26%. Next time you think of bullying someone or see someone being bullied step in and stop the violence, you never know you might save a life.
 * Videos **

media type="youtube" key="wY7Gvq0P4hc" height="416" width="481"media type="youtube" key="1j6YA03hm4k" height="416" width="429"media type="youtube" key="xPboK6yWKno" height="390" width="480"media type="youtube" key="isfn4OxCPQs" height="399" width="430" **Sources**

In this article they discuss how school violence affects students psychologically and physically and how it affects teachers. They also talk about how this affects students in the classroom and their learning. A statistic taken from this article stated that 63 in every 1000 students are victims of school violence that is a lot of students affected that might be getting lower grades due to this bringing everyone down. They stated in this article that one way to reduce school violence is to redesign schools; it was proven that if schools were designed differently to use space and keep circulation moving there was less violence.
 * Johnson, SL. “Improving the school environment to reduce school violence: a review of the literature.”**
 * (2009): Print.**

I like how this article is written because there are clear facts and statistics written out for you. I also like this because it is an actual study that was done and this is the results this isn’t just some article talking about another article. I also like this because I think it will be very useful in my writing to be able to give clear statistics and have a credible source like this. My plan is to use this article to talk about prevention of school violence and how you can change the layout of a school to make it safer for students.

School violence is a low level violent behavior but it has been shown to have negative physical and mental outcomes. This article states that having security guards, I.D. cards and cameras did very little to decrease the amount of violence that took place in the schools. But when there were teachers placed in the hall ways they saw a significant decrease in the violence that occurred in the hallways. By having teachers in the hallway on watch it related to a 26% decrease in reported school violence. This article worked out good for me because it is short and gets right to the point. All the information I need is laid out in a few sentences. They tell you exactly what was done in the study and what worked to reduce violence and what did not work. Again I plan to use this article for the section of my writing where I talk about what can be done to reduce or control the violence in schools. I also feel that this article is very credible because it is taken from the Milner Library website. This is also a journal article so it is most likely written by a scholarly author who has obtained a lot of knowledge on the subject.
 * Blosnich, J, and R Bossarte. “Low-Level Violence in schools: is there an association between school safety measures and peer victimization?”**
 * (2011): Print.**

This article gave a short background information about it and then it showed a flow chart of what was done to reduce the violence in their school. When a student was involved in a bullying act they were to report it then a staff member would determine the severity of the case which would then determine the next action that took place. Then the staff member will either add disciplinary action or put the students into a program that is to help resolve these problems. This program involves the students talking things out together with the involvement of staff and parents. These students will also have to fill out reports of what happened on each side of their stories. Then a few months later the staff will check back in with the students to see how things are going and if their system has worked. I think this is a really good source because there is little writing, the writing that is there basically just explains the chars and flow diagrams. I like this source because it will add another aspect to my writing that isn’t just text it will bring a graphical element to my project. I also think this is good because it actually shows you what will be going on and what actions will take place rather than just a bland old boring paper telling you. Again I plan to use this source for how school violence can be controlled and reduced; this just shows another way of it being done. I think this is a very credible source because it isn’t something that I just pulled off Google it was an article and study that I got from the Milner library.
 * Allen, Kathleen. “A Bullying Intervention System: Risk and Creating Support for Aggressive**
 * Students.”(2010): print**

James, Susan Donaldson. "Teen Commits Suicide Due to Bullying: Parents Sue School for Son's Death - ABC News." //ABCNews.com: Breaking News """ Politics,World News, Good Morning America, Exclusive Interviews - ABC News//. 02 Apr. 2009. Web. 14 """" Apr.2011. [].

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