For the Love of Kids A Plague of Bullies by Laura Page Kids Helping Kids 925-759-4806

The whole world was shocked a couple months ago when a Massachusetts high school student named Phoebe Nora Mary Prince committed suicide rather than submit for another day to her...

schoolmates’ taunts, jeers, and curses. Phoebe wasn’t the only teenager to commit suicide because of bullying. As many as 25 children a year are bullied into taking their own lives. Most of the cases of public school shootings involve students who have been unmercifully tormented and snap in the other direction.

A stark reality about that story was that, even though most of them don’t commit suicide or homicide, the horrors that Phoebe was subjected to were not out of the ordinary. It turns out that 77 percent of children polled report being bullied. Fifteen percent of high school students and 23 percent of elementary students had been bullied within the past three months.

Bullying reveals itself as emotional, verbal, or physical abuse that may include stealing, punching, shoving, slapping, teasing, and threatening. Other types of bullying include shunning, harassment, whispering, cursing, mocking, and profanity. Bullying occurs anyplace including schoolyards, school hallways, neighborhoods, and even churches. Cyber bullying over digital media, such as texting, is the latest trend by which some children torment their peers.

The website www.how-to-stop-bullying. com reports some sinister statistics. It turns out that California was the state in which bullying was the worst, followed by New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

• Each day 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied.

• Forty-three percent of the students polled reported fearing harassment in the bathroom at school.

• 282,000 students are physically attacked in secondary schools each month.

• Every seven minutes a child is bullied.

• 46% of males, and 26% of females reported they had been in physical fights.

While assembling the information for this column, I learned that one of my own sons had become the object of bullying. It brought back memories of my own awful experience in middle school when a fellow student named Deanna made my life miserable by cursing and punching me whenever our paths would cross. She made me unhappy about getting out of bed in the morning and going to school. Out of shame, I never spoke of the abuse to anyone, nor did my son ever willingly talk to me until the situation became known in an indirect manner...

User Rating: / 0
PoorBest