Jamie Rodemeyer a 14-years-old boy made videos about himself on YouTube in order to tell his story and try to help other children that are victims of bullying at school. “This is Jamie from Buffalo, New York. I’m just here to tell you that it does get better. Here is a little bit of my story. On December 2010, I thought I was bisexual, and then I always got made fun of because 1 Virtually has no guy friends. I only have friends that are girls. And it bothered me because people would be like faggot, fag, and they’d taunt me in the hallways, and then I felt like I could never escape it, don’t forget me when I come crying to heaven’s door,” Rodemeyer took his own life on September 18, 2011, after being bullied for years. He was another teen that could not handle this mistreatment anymore. Bullying is a form of aggressive behavior that is an intentional, persistent, and deliberate attempt to hurt or humiliate someone.
According to the Education for Peace Series, every 17 seconds a child is being bullied also, bullying is the social issue in children’s lives today, Schools are one of the most common places in which bullying takes place. Many people when they think about bullying at schools think of physical bullying: flushing someone‘s head in the toilet, cramming someone into his or her locker, hitting, slapping, etc. But bullying goes beyond the physical damage, it can be also verbal: threats, intimidation, name-calling, racist remarks, etc. Which can be just as harmful as physical bullying. This mistreatment can have a wide-ranging impact on the students affected and it may cause effects that can last long into their future. Schools should be a place in which students feel safe. Bullying must be illegal at schools because it causes a negative impact on student’s self— esteem, it causes some students to harm themselves and even commit suicide, and because it encourages dropping out of school.
Bullying causes a negative impact on students’ morale and self-esteem. “In the United States, bullying increases for boys and girls during late elementary years, peaks during the middle school years, and decreases in high school”. This time of life is when children begin forming their self-esteem. Some children get bullied because they are overweight, so they start disliking themselves and some of them become anorexic or bulimic, in order to be accepted; children that are gay or have any kind of disability are very susceptible to be bullied as well, “Self-esteem is the beliefs or feelings we have about ourselves. It is well known that children who grow up in a hostile environment and are battling every day with insults related to their bodies, their personality, or their sexual orientation and hear it so frequently which will result in lowering the children’s self-esteem. In addition, bullying in schools causes some students to harm themselves and even commit suicide.
The children do not feel accepted by their classmates and they feel like they are different from the rest of the group. This isolation can make a child get to such a point of desperation that they decided to harm themself and even commit suicide, “Thirty percent of all child suicides can be directly related to bullying”. As in the case of Rodemeyer, there have been multiple cases of children that at a very young age had decided to take their own life. “Nearly 1 of 4 students across grades of 6-10 reported that they had been harassed or bullied on school property because of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability” (bullyfree.com)i Most of the bullying cases are not reported and stay in the anonymity. Sometimes bullying is not reported because the students think that telling the teachers or their parents is not going to change anything; sometimes they have seen cases in where nothing was done about it.
In other cases students feel shame because they think that they are different and something is wrong with them So, they decided to keep it in a secret and that is what most affects them because they do not get any kind of therapy or support to overcome this issue. After long times of being bullied many students cannot handle this situation and the only exit that they find is take their own lives. Bullying in schools must become illegal because it encourages students to drop out of school, According to the National Association of School Psychologists, “160,000 students per day stay home from school because of bullying, seven percent of eighth graders stay home at least once a month because of bullies, twenty-five percent of girl’s grades 8 to 12 do not want to attend school and stay home or skip classes because of sexual bullying, and one out of 10 students drop out of school because they are bullied” People who object.
An anicle at “do somethingiorg” says that 57% of students who experience any kind of harassment in school never report the incident to the school and ten percent of those who do not report stay quiet because they do not believe that teachers or staff can do anything But this happens because students do not feel protected by any anti—bullying law, States such as New Jersey and Massachusetts that have anti»bullying laws reported that every day more and more students are starting to report this kind of abuses because they feel that the law is supporting their rights. In my opinion, bullying at schools must become illegal as soon as possible because bullying is affecting the normal development of our children. Pitifully, it seems like our government is still waiting for more deaths before they something to protect the student from bullyingi. While the government stays unaware and careless about this issue and the teachers keep seeing this as part of growing up and that nothing is wrong with it, more students are going to be affected by bullying. There are going to be more deaths and our future generations are going to grow up with many traumatic experiences.
