We are living in a world where some people think that violence is the only reason to solve every problem.
If people keep this violence around us, it’s not going to get better. Violence has been in this world for centuries now and for the same cause, to gain the power of authority. Kids in schools feel superior to others by calling other kids horrible names and making fun of them. Men hit women so they can “earn” their respect back. The point is that violence won’t make you a better person, it will make you a monster and nobody likes a monster.
There are many different kinds of violence. One of them is called bullying. The victims of this violence are mostly kids and teenagers around the ages of 10-18. Bullying is when someone says mean things to someone in person or on a social network.
Most of the time it happens in the social network because kids think that by making fun of someone in a social network area, they won’t get in trouble with an adult. This is one of the worst violence in the world because is between kids and teenagers. Most teenagers today have very low self-esteem because of the media. They haven’t still found what they want to do with their lives, so, saying mean things to them, won’t help them be successful since they think that what they are saying is true.
There are over 3.2 million students that are victims of bullying each year. Because of these, approximately 160,000 teens skip school every day to avoid bullies. Some of these students drop out of school. Some schools don’t even help the victims that are been bullied. Over two-thirds of students believe that schools respond poorly to bullying, with a high percentage of students believing that adult help is infrequent and ineffective.
I didn’t know that harassment and bullying have been linked to 75 percent of school-shooting incidents. There have been many cases of suicide because of bullying. One of the recent ones was the suicide of Amanda Todd. She committed suicide on October 10, 2012, at her home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. She was 16 years old when she died.
On September 7, 2012, she posted a 9-minute video on YouTube titled My Story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, and self-harm, which showed her using flash cards to tell her experiences being bullied. The reason she was bullied was that when she was in 7th grade, she used video chat to meet new people over the internet. People she met would always give her compliments about her looks. A stranger convinced her to bare her breasts on camera. He later blackmailed her with threats to expose the topless photo to her friends unless she gave a “show”.
The photo of her circulated on the internet. She moved to different places to start fresh, but the individual would always disguise himself as a student coming new to the school. She tried to kill herself by drinking bleach and an overdose on drugs, but it didn’t work. Students from her school would make fun of her because she failed in her suicide and her grades. After the entire nightmare, on October 10, 2012, at about 6:00 PM, she was found hanged at her home. Like I said before, most teenagers have very low self-esteem and by telling them to mean things, they will only become worse.
Everybody makes mistakes. Kids today are always on the internet and they meet strangers every day. As a parent, you need to pay attention to everything that the kid is doing. If you don’t want to have problems like this, don’t talk to strangers over the internet.
Once it’s on the internet it stays there forever. If you see someone that is being bullied over the internet or at school, contact an adult or confront the person yourself. If we all stand up together against bullying, the world will be a better place. You might think that the one that you are making fun of is a monster because of the stuff he or she has done, but in reality, you are the monster for making them feel worse.
