A Response to "confronting the Bullies"

A response to “Confronting the Bullies”

               In “Confronting the Bullies”, Cooper talks about the large scale issue of bullying in today’s culture. She talks about the different severities of bullying and how much easier it is for bullies to get to kids with the increase in the usage of technology. Cooper then goes on about the issue by mentioning the new way bullied kids are dealing with their problems. Cooper also explains the new struggles parents have with keeping up with their children and protecting them from bullying. 

               Over the years there has been a startling increase of bullying in schools. Kids, being faced with new forms of bullying and increasing severity of previous bullying practices, have taken to new ways to escape their tormentors. In Elise Cooper’s article, “Confronting the Bullies” she gives this escape a name…“bullycide” “An expert and consultant on school violence, Deborah Runion, told American Thinker that the suicide rates among children are increasing and that it ranks as the second-highest cause of death in America for children between the ages of ten to twenty-four.” (Cooper) Kids that are bullied are typically bombarded with hateful comments. Especially in today’s ever growing social media access, anyone can say anything. The commenter’s remarks can go as far to tell the individual to kill themselves because they “would be doing the world a favor”. Sometimes these victims don’t understand why they are being bullied in the first place and often follow suit and disappear.

        There are a variety of reasons why kids are bullied. The most common cases are due to race, looks, and size. One reason though typically goes under the radar, and wasn’t even mentioned in the main article: personal interests. From my personal experience I have never been bullied by my looks or size. I have though been bullied for my personal interests in things like Pokemon, Bakugan, YuGiOh, manga, anime, playing video games, and even creating my own little group in elementary with my friends pretending all of us had super powers. Name-calling and rocks were thrown at my group day after day on the playground. Stating our dilemma to the teachers or school counselors only made the situations worse because in some way, word of our conversations would get back to the bullies and invoke a rage that brought chasings and an unfair game of dodge ball. The article mentions that schools, when approached about a bullying issue, claimed that there was no issue and brushed the incident under the table. This brings up another issue. If the school is not willing to take care of the issue then what does the parent do?

        Parents, when faced with the issue of bullying, often feel in some way responsible for not keeping their children from harm and ridicule. Stan Davis, author of two anti-bullying books and publisher of the website Stop Bullying Now tells parents “don’t overreact when speaking to your child or to the school. It’s important for parents to have a real good check on their own emotionality before talking to their child. The problem with showing that emotion is that the child may think Dad’s blood pressure is going up and won’t tell him the next time. Or the child worries that you’ll charge in angrily to the school and make things worse.” This leads to a vicious cycle of hesitation by the child and parent resulting in sad choices made by the children.