The Need for Anti-Bullying Laws

Bullying has been escalating to a certain degree that it has affected as many as 160,000 students that reported staying home from school every day, because they were afraid of being bullied (www.stompoutbullying.org). Bullying does not only stops one from wanting to go to school, it also makes one feel anxious, insecure, and unhappy at school, isolated and at times severely depressed (Young, Shin Kim, and Leventhal). Schools must have better resources available to students; this includes the victim and the bully. The victim should have both better counseling and stricter laws to protect them. Bullies also need counseling due to research which states “that many bullies tend to come from families where parents are more physically/emotionally aggressive or where other type’s family problems exist” (Schwartz, Dodge, Petit, and Bates) and stricter laws as well to protect from neglect or abuse within their family. Better protection and counseling need to be enforced to help stop bullying because it causes emotional and psychological damage to the victims.Bullying has always been around in schools. Korean scholar Hyojin Koo wrote of a twelve year old boy at King’s School in Cambridge who died of a bullying incident in 1885. Later a former student of the school wrote “a favourite habit of some of the elder boys was to link arms and rush down the long corridor at the top of their speed, and woe betides any unfortunate youngster” (Quoted in Ibid p.7). The taunts, teasing and violence were just considered being part of a normal childhood. “The first scientific paper on bullying was published in 1897, when Norwegian researcher Fredric Burkes “Teasing and Bullying/ explored why children bully, what effects bullying had on victims and how bul...

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