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An essay explaining the nature of bullying and its effect on those who are victims
An essay explaining the nature of bullying and its effect on those who are victims
Different forms of bullying and its effects on the victim
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Peer victimization as a social behavior between children and their peers has become of paramount importance within education institutes. Two Canadian literature pieces, Cat’s Eye and The Shape of a Girl, were able to highlight the psychological pain inflicted onto others through bullying. In Cat’s Eye by author Margaret Atwood, Elaine Risley, remembers her childhood memories of a relationship with a bully, and how it affected her life and changed her from a weak girl into a strong woman. The Shape of a Girl by playwright Joan MacLeod, tells audiences a short story between a victim and a bully, Braidie. As a result of the destructive psychological effects caused by bullying, many individuals were forced to live a life in complete fear. However, the ways people cope with these situations are significantly different. Many victims tend to hold these repressed emotions deep inside their heart, producing psychological injuries. From literature, it can also be identified that a bully may also suffer from similar psychological pain as a victim, but struggles to find a way to deal with their pain, resulting in an endless chain of peer victimization. Understanding from both a victim and bully’s perspective, it can be finally understood that these very different characters have personalities that essentially parallels.
Being bound by the tormentors of their lives, victims are unable to break free of the chain holding them back from discovering themselves. An unfortunate victim of bullying, Elaine Risley was portrayed by Margaret Atwood to show qualities of fear and her struggle for individuation, “I’m having that trouble myself now; too close to a mirror and I’m a blur, too far back and I can’t see the details.” (Atwood 15) With the weakenin...
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...ound by a bully, victims are unable to escape the endless loop. Bullies on the other hand, do not even bother to understand a victim’s suffering. However, while bullies may have their own reasoning behind their display of power, their mindset is actually quite similar to a victim. The destructive psychological effects inflicted onto others creates unfortunate victims that cope with situations differently, some stay silent while others inflict more pain onto others. While modern literature such as Cat’s Eye and The Shape of a Girl only highlights the endless loop of the decay in the education system, a journey for self-individuation is the solution that is required for both victim and bully to end the outrageous trend.
Works Cited
MacLeod, Joan. The Shape of a Girl;Jewel. Vancouver: Talon, 2002. Print.
Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.
In Phoebe’s Prince story, for instance, no amount of finger pointing or apportioning blame can address the underlying issues. For one, she was an emotionally disturbed girl who had tried to end her life before she got bullied in school. Apart from her depressive state, Phoebe had minimal communication of her challenges in school with her parents or any authority figures (teachers or even the school principal) in her life. These gaps are what are highlighted in this paper and hopefully when fully grasped can help to minimize the gaps that exist in our social
Have you ever been bullied before? Bullied so bad that you thought you can make that person stop by doing something you might regret one day. In the Jodi Picoult novel, Nineteen Minutes we’re going to examine how being bullied can lead to school violence like school shootings. And in order to better understand it, one must have an understanding of many social influences. The people that you talk to can have these influences like friends, family, adults, or other kids around you. Some of them say that they know you, but the real question is do we really understand or care to understand anyone? Are we really ready to learn things about other people than having people learn things about us by the way we act at school, home or hanging out with
Andrea Gibson’s’ poem ‘Letter to the Playground Bully’ is an unforgettable poem about bullying. She cleverly crafts a poem from the perspective of an 8 and a half year old girl who is trying to confront the playground bully through a letter. The poem’s sole purpose is to expose the hardships and reality for victims of bullying. She achieves this by making the speaker a younger version of herself. She wrote this poem in order to perform in front of high school and elementary school students to try and stop bullying. Gibson explores unfamiliar territory related to bullying in a straightforward, sweet, yet different approach.
Rachel Simmons was amazed there were so many books regarding aggression in boys, but was unable to find any books on the subject of girls’ aggression. The experiments that were conducted regarding aggression were also only performed using males. Many psychologists considered aggression to be behavior such as hitting, punching, name calling and threatening others as a male issue. Simmons discovered from the many interviews she conducted on women that aggression is just as much a female issue. In her book, “The Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls”, Simmons interviews many women and girls who were victims of bullying, were the actual bully, and also people who witnessed the abuse. Simmons’ purpose for writing this book was to make everyone aware of the secretive way girls bully each other, and to show how they hide their aggression, which many times is the result of their own struggle for acceptance. This book was effective because Simmons also gives the reader suggestions to help everyone involved in some form of aggressive behavior know how to deal with this behavior, and the lifelong consequences it has on everyone involved.
One out of every four kids are bullied everyday in the U.S. Each day 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied. Being the new kid is hard enough without having a very noticeable facial deformity. In Wonder, the author, R.J Palacio writes about a kid that teens can empathize since most teens have been bullied at least once in their life before. I would very much recommend this book to my fellow peers due to the excellent quality of the book.
Author, Marge Piercy, introduces us to a young adolescent girl without a care in the world until puberty begins. The cruelty of her friends emerges and ultimately she takes her own life to achieve perfection in “Barbie Dolls” (648). At the time when all children are adjusting to their ever changing bodies, the insults and cruelties of their peers begin and children who were once friends for many years, become strangers over night caught in a world of bullying. A child who is bullied can develop severe depression which can lead to suicide; and although schools have been educated in recognizing the signs of bullying, there is an epidemic that has yet to be fully addressed within our schools or society.
The documentary film Bully (2011) – directed by Lee Hirsh – takes the viewer into the lives of five families that live in various, predominantly remote, towns across the United States. All families presented have been affected by bullying, either because their child was at the time being bullied by peers at school or the child committed suicide due to continuous bullying. The film also profiles an assistant principle, Kim Lockwood, whose indiscreetness makes the viewer...
Dracic, Sabaha. "Bullying And Peer Victimization ." Materia Socio Medica 21.4 (2009), 216-219. Academic Search Complete. Web. 9 Feb. 2014
Olweus, D. (1984). Aggressors and their victims: Bullying at school. In N. Fmde & H. Gault
Thesis statement: Approximately three thousand people get bullied everyday, and at some point in our life we got bullied, even though not everyone is the same, for some other people their situation is worse.
The topic of bullies is one that has concerned parents and schools for almost as long as schools have been around, but the real question is who should dispense with this serious dilemma of our children getting harassed the school or the parents? It is time for schools to step up to the bat and dispense of this serious problem of our children getting tormented in and out of class by other pupil. It is time for schools to step up to the bat and dispense of this serious problem of our children getting tormented in and out of class by other pupil. Learning institutes should be cutting the problem of bullying down from the roots instead of deserting it and letting this mess appear into the bullied child’s personal live at home. Not letting the problem develop will prevent many mishaps from occurring in the future.
Over the past several years, it has not been uncommon to hear about bullying. Unfortunately, bullying is something that has affected the lives of millions of people around the world. Some of those people have had resolve from the bullying, and many people have not been able to reach that resolve and the effects have been emotionally scarring. According to Dictionary.com, “bullying is a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people”. Based on the definition alone, there might be a time where any individual could reflect back to when they were in school and they were witness to or victim of a bully. The remainder of this paper will discuss the following:
In a CNN study by Chuck Hadad he states “That bullying is pervasive even though the schools have anti-bullying programs from kindergarten through 12th grade, assemblies throughout the year, and a peer-to-peer program where older students talk to younger students about the dangers of bullying” (Hadad). Robert Faris, a sociologist found that bullies and victims are generally the same person. Whe...
The article, “Bullies and Their Victims”, by Berk (2010) gives an analysis of how bullies and their victims develop, what makes them persistent and how they and their victims can be assisted. Bullying is an activity that thrives mostly in a school setting because of peers and the various cultures and diversities among them. Interactions are inevitable among children, but bullying is destructive because it aims at peer victimisation. Both boys and girls have the ability to become bullies but the majority of them are boys who use physical and verbal attacks on their victims. In the more recent generations, the means of bullying is amplified in the adolescent stage by using electronic means like cyber bullying. Students will rarely like bullies but if they do, it is because of their leadership abilities or influential personalities. Their peers may join or stand by to watch as the victims are bullied.
Thesis: Bullying is a serious problem in our society today. The victims of bullying are not the problem, the bullies are.