School Violence (Bullying)

School violence has gone on for as long as schools have been open. Psychologists categorize the different types of school violence into three separate categories; verbal,physical, and retaliation. They say Verbal is the most impacting type of school bullying cause it stays with you longer and has more psychological effects on the victim. While physical shows signs,retribution is mainly a backlash of students excluding and ignoring the victim. It has become a society problem, although sometimes its not acknowledged we all know its there. It usually takes something massive to bring everyone’s attention to the problem, such as Columbine shooting. There are several instances that are not as publicized as the Columbine but they still impact the community. Such as the mother arrested for chocking her daughters bullier, or the young girl that hung herself, and even the coach that joined in on the bullying of a student. Bullying takes place more than just in school, its cyber as well and harder to stop. There was an instance in Florida where the mother of a teen girl was concerned when her daughter was slipping into depression and having suicidal thoughts because of a cyber-bully. Since the systems have not caught up to the cyber world most cases are hard to get a result from reporting it. The daughter took the steps to stop this by informing the schools resource center and the police of the incidents going on, yet they did nothing to help. With the mom concerned for her daughter she ended up loosing it when she saw her daughters tormentor in the mall. She ended up chocking the teenager and landing in jail. Her daughter was under verbal bullying, which is the highest form and longest lasting of the three bullying categories. The mother taking things into her own hands, in my opinion, wasn’t the best thing to do, but sometimes you get to where you have limited options and the primal side comes out.

Most people think school violence is focused on certain types of people, such as the poor, younger and social misfits. Even though most the stories you hear are generally about the kid that wore black and stayed in the corner type, its not always true. Even the popular pretty people can be a victim as well. Such as in the case of the teenage girl that hung herself. She was a beautiful girl in the popular crowd that was described as having a lot of friends and being well liked by all. But she became the main target for other girls out lashings. They would bully her about being to pretty and to popular, they started degrading her bringing her down to the lowest levels they could get her to. She finally broke and committed suicide by hanging herself in her room, she didn’t die a slow death she died six days later while on life support. When they canvased the school for information a lot of students informed the parents and officials that in the recent proceeding months she has been the victim of harsh bullying, including verbal, physical and retaliation bullying. Since no one truly know the reason for the targeting of this young girl, it makes it harder to find how to stop this vicious cycle. Physiologists do believe it is an learned action to bully people.

Another misconception of school violence is that it is only carried out by the students, this too is not the case. Anyone can be the tormentor or the victim, such as the case of the gym teacher that joined in on the physical bullying of a teenage student. Since violence is all around a very horrible thing it doesn’t help when the teacher is implementing or encouraging it. That is what happened in a Washington school, the teacher and rest of the class were physically hurting another student during study time. They were pinning him down writing on him, putting cones on his head and stuffing socks in his mouth to muffle the screams while they were swinging him by his limbs around the room. Some students thinking it was so cool to do video taped