Bullying, this word will strike a chord with many people in the world. According to a survey Harvest Centre for Research, Training & Development, and also the Coalition Against Bullying for Children & Youth, 95 percent of students in Singapore have experienced bullying before. Many adults think that bullying is just something everyone goes through and that it would not affect their child much. However, they are wrong. The gunman of the Virginia Tech shooting was Cho Seung-Hui, a 23 year-old. When he was in high school, he was constantly picked on by others because of his shyness and unusual speech patterns. Though there was no evidence that this caused him to kill 32 people and injure many in his university, but the bullying must had inevitably caused him to act weird when he was in university. This indirectly caused him to plan the massacre.

Since bullying has been said to have many disadvantages, why do people still bully? It is because bullying makes them feel good about themselves. Imagine this: when you fall down, what do many people do? They laugh sadistically and never even try to help you up. So whenever a bully sees his victims begging for forgiveness, hears them cry for help, it makes them feel good about themselves. This can be a way of gaining pleasure, though temporary, when the bully has problems in his/her life. Secondly, bullying helps you gain popularity. Somehow, people think that those who are feared are ‘cool’. For example, there was an incident in which a few girls punched and stripped another of their schoolmate. They recorded the incident and posted in on video-sharing sites. In a month, the video already received ten thousand over hits. Insane you may think, but it is the cold, hard truth.

Here is a standard answer you find in the textbook on how to stop getting bullied: Tell your teacher or your parents that you are being bullied. That is a good way of not getting yourself bullied. However, how many of the victims will have the courage to stand up and tell his or her teacher? The victims fear that after the teachers know about the bully, the bully will bully him even more. The probability of this is not much, but it is just an obstacle that stops them from telling their teachers. In my opinion, since the victims cannot help themselves, we should help them. As long as we are not those who have no initiative to help others, we can tell the teachers about the bully. That is if, as I said, we want to help. Actually, there are ways to reduce bullying, such as educating the bullies or placing teachers or people to patrol the school, however there is never a way of stopping bullying completely. What we can try to do is to try to minimize what has been done. Not only the bullied has to be counseled, the bully has to too. A lot of support from the victim’s family is needed for the victim to be recovered from the emotional damages.

Almost everyone thinks that bullies are usually those who have problems with their life. Actually, it is not only them. In fact, it could be anyone. Bullying does not have to be only restricted to physically harm. Calling other people names or ostracizing them. Even the teacher’s pet could be a bully too when he makes others feel inferior to him. So next time, whenever you call someone 'noob', even if it is a joke, the person might still find it offending. Maybe a bully is reading this now, maybe a bully is writing a reflection on bullying now.

Sometimes, when handling such bullying cases, we often ignore the bully and emphasize more on the victim. At this rate, the bully can never change and will continue to bully others. In my opinion, many bullies are entrapped in a never-ending cycle, when they grow up, most of them will become criminals and in the end, when the law gets them, they are remorseful, yet unable to change because it is too late. So we must tackle this problem when they are the most vulnerable-when they are young.

Also, remember never to start bullying. You may feel good about kicking the soul out of someone, but what happens if you were the one getting your soul kicked out? When you regret, it is usually too late...



Here are two pictures:

By Vincent

Labels: By Vincent