School bullying is violence and it kills children.
In the last few weeks, it became evident that bullying is violence and bullying kills. Thanks to the media, the public is becoming a little more familiar with the topic and the dangers of bullying. There can never be a better time to raise public awareness about bullying. Bullying is nothing new; we have simply not dealt with it as much as we should. And all of us need to say no more bullying and no more violence
Two separate incidents of suicide by hanging have forced many of us to reflect on a subject that is normally not the usual topic. While most of us focusing on ourselves, politics, the economy, the Wall Street debacle, same sex marriages, and other interesting topics, eleven-year-old Carl Joseph of Walker-Hooverin Springfield, Massachusetts, and eleven-year-old Jaheem Herrera, a student at Dunaire Elementary School in DeKalb County, Georgia, endured the pain and emotional torture of being bullied. Unable to endure any more pain and torture of being bullied in school, Carl and Jaheem committed suicide and hang themselves to death.
Why You Should Take Bullying Seriously?
Bullying is a common and potentially damaging form of violence among children and sometimes between adults. Bullying takes an emotional toll on children; at times it even kills. Bullying is not a matter of teasing, it is a delinquent and criminal behavior and many bullies grow up to commit crimes. Fight crime/Invest in kids, a non-partisan organization based in Washington D.C., conducted research that indicates that nearly 60 percent of boys who bullied from grade one through nine were convicted of at least one crime by age twenty-four and 40 percent had three or more convictions by age twenty-four. Preventing bullying benefits all of us, it keeps many children safe, and it can prevent the escalation of criminal behavior and future criminal acts.
According to the Invest in kids fight crime, a ”survey shows that 3.2 million youths were victims of bullying nationwide, and 3.7 millions were bullies.” According to the America Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “Researches indicate that as many as half of all children are bullied at some time during their school years, and at least 10 percent are bullied on a regular basis” and that some as we have recently seen in the case of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, committed suicide rather tan continue to suffer more taunting, harassment, and the mental punishment of bullying.
If and when bullying does not kill, bullying still hurts and it can have consequences on your child that last a lifetime. According to a survey conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation “Talking with Kids About Tough Issues” 55 percent of children 8–11 report that teasing is a “big problem,” violence 46 percent between ages 12–15 68 percent state that teasing is a big problem and 63 percent report violence as a big problem.
Other studies indicate that bullying and teasing top the list of children’s school troubles and that many say talking with their parents does little to ease the stress. Both Jaheem and Carl’s families report that they had informed the administration of their children schools that the boys were being bullied. Yet their emotional stress went unabated.
Who’s to be blamed? Although we cannot hold teachers and school administrators responsible to raise the students who attend their schools, nonetheless, we must hold them responsible when and if they fail to enforce anti-bulling and fail to secure the safety of school children during school hours. Should the regulations currently in place not sufficient to meet the need of the students, school administrators must address these issues and put in place measures capable of protecting children from the mental anguish of bullying. If anything, the schools must intervene even without regulations and alert authorities when incidents of bullying are reported.
