The Causes and Effects of Bullying

I know you’ve heard this before, but bullying is a huge problem for many people all around the globe. Bullying is when one person or a group of people make rude comments towards another or harasses them repeatedly. Cyberbullying is when someone is harassing someone via text messaging, tweeting, IMing, or even video chatting.

Why Does the Bully bully?

There could be many causes for people to feel the need to bully someone. It could be that they were feeling annoyed or angry that day and needed to take their feelings out on someone else, or because there are things going on in the bully’s personal life that they think no one can understand, so they push people who are trying to help them away, and a last cause could be because they think that making fun of someone will get them into the “popular crowd” or make them look cool. Trust me, bullying someone will get you nothing.

So What Happens to the Victim?

When someone is thinking about harassing someone, they don’t think about how their words would impact the person they’re bullying. If the bullies’ words have a negative impact on the victim, it will be harder and take longer to brush off. Most bullying leads to stress, depression, low self-esteem, and, sadly, suicide. And what hurts me the most is that once the bully has seen how bad their words and actions have impacted him/her, they then start reaching out. Doesn’t make sense, right? If in the end you’re going to start feeling bad about what you did, why do it in the first place?

Bye-standers

Bystanders. Yes, I know I spelled it wrong up there, but you’ll see why in a second. Bystanders are people who witness the conviction happening, but do nothing about it. If you see something happening, tell an adult, teacher, guidance counselor, or the principal. Doing this won’t make you a tattletale, it will help stop the interrogation from continuing on. Please don’t stand there and watch without doing anything after. You could be the key to ending the problem, so why don’t you do just that?

~Emily

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