Effects of Bullying
To many, school days have a special place in our hearts. Our fondest memories are in the time spent with friends in the corridors and having fun, but to some it’s a traumatic experience.
Treating people with the kindness and respect they deserve is a quote unfamiliar to the bullies. It is not hard to explain how some people find this pleasure in causing people pain—people feel superior putting down others or dominating them. Especially the teenage bullies. Bullying is something that is deeply rooted in human psychology. This problem with no real solution as of yet. An inflating popularity gap between the bully and the victim, perceived ‘un-attractiveness’ of the victim, even the academic performance can create a bully-victim situation in schools.
Bullying is this form of deliberate and offensive behavior directed towards a particular person. It can happen in physical and mental ways. Mental and Physical forms of bullying are equally traumatizing and devastating. Mental forms may include immense psychological damage like continuously ignoring them and telling others to do the same. Physical can include various forms of beating just because they want to show their power towards the weaker opponent. These forms of bullying have the power to completely change a person.
What’s terrible is that the victim themselves could be blamed for making it easy to bully them. No one chooses to be bullied, but the bullies do it nonetheless. Just as Percy Jackson and Harry Potter were bullied at school for being different from others, bullies prey on their victims with an amalgamation of excuses like “She is the antique piece of her class” and “Look at her, she is so talkative”, “He cries like a little girl, so we beat him out of it” “She looks like a gorilla”. They prey on their victim with harsh, acidic words that are seldom true but deeply hurt the victim from the inside. They make the victim feel like repressing that part of their personality and never bringing it back up.
Bullies never feel guilty for what they do and move on from one prey to the other, or sometimes keep ‘playing around’ with one individual.. One day you could be quietly minding your business and in the next you could be one of their victims. One particular person who is different from the others, not in the aspect of intelligence but on the basis of looks. They look for other characteristics like being more sensitive, more weak-willed than others;in simpler words, a chatterbox , the quiet silent one of the class and a crybaby are the ones they often victimize. Blinded by their feeling of dominance they tend to abuse these traits to lord their power over them. A different type of bullies are the ones who act like a friend and end up pushing them to a corner,then saying poisonous words like, “You do not deserve friends” or“Nobody likes you”. Some people have the courage to stand up to their bully, others have the ability to ignore them, but many others succumb to the bullying. Standing up to the bully is the right thing to do but often, standing up to them means getting bullied more and losing the few friends you have. They are the most popular ones who will make your life miserable for their pleasure. The words of a bully have this astounding effect to always linger with time. The ones who carry those scarring words inside are the ones who end up mentally unwell not limited to insecurity, self-depreciation and trust issues.. The wounds on the inside are unbearable, reminding them that they are not worthy of being happy in life, or that they will never be worthy to be called a normal human being. Fear makes it difficult for them to trust the people closest to them. They are always poked by that voice inside their heads that they will always be antiques.
As the years go on, the painful memories wane, but never fully disappear. Making friends gets tougher and the fear of losing friends builds up over time. Episodes of passive overthinking especially the good times in their life, bouts of stress or anxiety, because they are worried people might start to dislike them a reserve person who did not have the ability to stand up to their bullies remains unaffected by time. Teenage dramas have portrayed the realities of bullying in movies like Mean Girls, Accepted, and Bully where the characters change and think about their reputation in college. By taking the position of the most popular student in class, victims in movies like Mean Girls stood up to their bullies and then became mean to others before realizing their mistake towards the end. As shown in this example, one’s thirst for dominance leads them to become bullies themselves.
No institution in the world is perfectly immune to bullying. Every institution has that one person who cannot live without the thirst for popularity and the itch to the itch to make others’ life miserable. Educational institutions could always instill programs related to bullying and its consequences on the victims to motivate the victims to stand up for what is right and for others to help the victims. Many of these effects of bullying are short term but there are profound long-term consequences to the same. A few of them to name are low self-esteem and lack of confidence. Our future years are made difficult by the two of them. Psychologists believe that understanding bullying in adulthood is crucial when we turn eighteen and leave school, we do not leave all the experiences of bullying behind, rather they stay with us. It might be impossible to escape these effects forever, as they seem perpetual. It is however possible to let go of these thoughts and feelings by sharing them with the right people. Their
saviors are the the people who are able to help them get over get over these negative memories.
Do not bully. Do not condone bullying.
Do not bully. Do not condone bullying.
