Bullying essay

Submitted By pieguy
Words: 1774
Pages: 8

Lately there has been an alarming increase, 24.5% in a span of 4 years, in the amount of bullying that takes place; not only here in America but world-wide bullying has been on the rise for about a decade now. Eventually people began to notice the sharp rise in bullying and immediately began to look into the subject. Upon completing their study the researchers found that 77% of teens would admit to being bullied, but of that 77% only about half were bullied in person. The other half were bullied online via social media or through texts and other forms of modern day communication. Upon realizing this people immediately began joining together into uproar of anti-bullying sentiments blaming the internet for its rapid increase. School assemblies crafted specifically to combat bullying quickly became the norm most of which focused on the newly emerged cyber-bullying with slogans like “Delete Cyber Bullying. Don’t Write It and Don’t Forward It.” Or warning children that “Online Harassment Has Off-Line Impact” this movement now has people to arguing that not only are kids today are stupid and violent because of television and their new mainstream culture, but are also claiming that increase bullying is because of the increase in internet activity. I however feel that while there is a correlation between the two blaming the internet for the increase in bullying would be wrong because it is a person’s misuse of the internet that is causing this new trend. All the internet has truly done is given people a new way to bully someone and a lot more time to do it. With the now near unlimited access to the internet people can harass and bully people 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It’s very likely that people were going to bully you anyways it’s just now they can do it while you’re at home in the privacy of your home. Despite this ridiculous increase in the amount of bullying it is only increasing proportionally to the bullying opportunities presented to those online. And believe it or not this isn’t the first time there has been a sharp rise in bullying, another example of bullying seemingly spiraling out control was when public schools were first implemented. Similar to present day the use of public schools was not the cause of the rise in bullying but they did allow people more time to bully someone and new ways to do it. Before public schools bullying was near non-existent because of obvious reasons you were with your family 80 percent of the time and there wasn’t really many things to make fun someone for; all you could really bully someone about back then was how they looked or how poor they were. Not to mention your allotted time for being able to bully someone was probably at max a couple hours a day so of course bullying wasn’t a problem. Then schools were invented and all of the sudden you had at least 5 hours a day on top of the 2 you already had and entirely new ways to bully someone like getting bad grades or even good ones. Now for the first time we see classic school yard bullying something that quickly became the norm and was labeled as building character. Now bullying was the norm and it remained such for centuries and became imbedded in our culture everyone knew there was bullying and that you were either a bully or bullied. But, that was normal and they were okay with it; because of this should there ever be more time or new ways to bully someone it will occur nothing will ever be a truly bully-free zone. Now the trend begins with the internet a sudden increase in the time you are able to bully someone and a whole new world new ways to do it. With the increased access and use of the internet people now a days can jump on Facebook and put up rude and derogatory post at literally any time of the day so long as they have Wi-Fi or a data plan. So with the ability to do something at any point in the day it is only natural that it would occur more often. So sure bullying has more than doubled since the internet but the