Schools bring awareness to bullying in various forms such as lessons given to students, educational videos, posters and a few others. But is this enough? These lessons focus a lot on how to identify bullying and telling students to not do it, which over time tends to get very generic and bland. To lower rates of bullying, there may need to be some changes made to these lessons.
One of the first things these lessons always go over is what bullying is defined as. According to Oxford Languages, bullying is defined as someone “seeking to harm, intimidate, or coerce (someone perceived as vulnerable).” Some students have their own perspective on the whole ordeal as well, such as others simply going out of their way to be rude to another person.
In Brownsburg schools, students may remember the posters and lectures given on bullying. The information was taught multiple times for students to be able to identify bullying.
“Bullying is repeated.
There is an imbalance of power-you are afraid.
Bullying is intentional-they do it just to be mean.”
-BCSC Bullying Policy on the Brownsburg Community School Corporation Website
From spreading rumors in school to making posts online about people, or even saying unnecessary things to people’s faces, the web of torment gets more intricate and harder to deal with. While people were once told to tell an adult if anything bad happens, at the age of adolescence, telling an adult is the equivalent of social martyrdom, and whoever tells may be labeled as a ‘snitch’. Therefore, it’s hard to really get rid of this issue.
One thing that may help is to not only teach about the signs of bullying and what to do if a person sees it but also explain to people the repercussions of it.
“They need to bring more awareness to the effects of bullying,” freshman Paisley Whitaker said. “They teach the basics, but they don’t teach the repercussions of what people can do to themselves.”
There are many outcomes of bullying from a small scale of someone generally becoming sadder, to escalating to an issue of a victim doing irreparable damage to their life, or even others. One thing that causes this to be a big issue is a lack of sympathy in the student body.
“I think it would help if people understood how much it can affect a person,” sophomore Janelle Wetli said.
Many people go about their day and don’t think twice about what they say. Many people, even the ones who hurt others, also have things they struggle with. Despite all this, people seem to avoid any true recognition of the effects of having a lack of sympathy and decency towards others. This avoidance becomes a nearly unfixable problem, and even though it isn’t very prominent because there isn’t a lot of big stories surrounding it, people shouldn’t wait until irreversible damage is done to others’ lives to then try and fix the problem. If people just think of others, or mind how they act, this issue has hope to be fixed.
