Bullying is a big problem for children and young people that go through it. It knocks their self-esteem and makes them lose their confidence, and can make them dread going to school each day. In extreme cases, young people can become suicidal as a result of bullying, while in other very serious cases, it can get out of hand and lead to the bully murdering their victim. It’s also a huge problem for parents and teachers, because stopping bullying is a hard task and they often don’t know the best ways to go about it. There are three key elements to stopping bullying: educating the bullies, imposing greater sanctions for the bullies, and protecting the victim.
The reason that bullies must be educated is that many of them are not aware of exactly how much they are hurting their victim. In serious cases, it is probably wholly deliberate, but even then, most bullies wouldn’t want their victim to become as suicidal as they have made them. Bullying can come in all sorts of forms and one that affects girls in particular is a group of so-called friends excluding them from everything. In cases like these, if the bullies understood that they had become bullies picking on a victim, they may think twice.
The second way to deal with the bullies is to punish them. This could be the only thing that works for incredibly nasty people, because they will only care when it begins to affect them. Bullying often isn’t taken seriously enough; for example, if you punched a person in the middle of the street you would probably be arrested, but if it happens in a case of bullying, the perpetrator might get a detention. It is important not to allow things to happen in school that they would never get away with out in the real world, and children and young people who don’t have boundaries and sanctions imposed as they grow up may not obey the law as adults.
The final main way to deal with bullying involves working with the victim. Victims of bullying need to know their self-worth so that they don’t just accept what’s happening to them, and need to be taught to be assertive without just being aggressive. They should also be taught that self-defence is allowed when necessary, and should not be punished for it, while it is very important that adults always listen to them and take their concerns very seriously.
All in all, there is no one single solution for bullying, but it’s not good enough to ignore it just because it’s hard to deal with. By using a combination of these three tactics, teachers should be able to stop bullying at school long before it gets out of hand.
