Every year, my school has a required bullying awareness presentation, cramming all 2,000+ kids into a small auditorium to watch the same speaker present the same presentation as last year. And every year, all 2,000+ students, (whether we admit it or not) lazily lean back in the auditorium chairs and think to ourselves (or out loud) “What’s the point of this again? Why do we have to watch this presentation every year? Bullying isn’t even a thing anymore.”
I’ll admit that even during the annual presentation in September a single thought crossed my mind: “Is bullying really that prominent anymore? I mean, I haven’t been consistently bullied in two years; is it really still that bad?” I quickly slapped that mentality out of my mind when I realized that holy hell, it really is that bad.
As far as American schools go, our knowledge of bullying develops itself through nineties videos of scrawny boys with round glasses and Urkel-esque outfits getting shoved into compacted lockers. Occasionally, they’re called a slur or two, depending upon the “severity” of the bullying.
Is it safe to say that these videos and bullying prevention tactics have outdated themselves? Absolutely.
Being a senior in a densely packed high school, it’s easy to say that over the years, a new form of bullying has risen into the halls of schools everywhere. This new wave of bullying is dark, gut wrenching, and easily brushed off. The nineties locker era has transformed into a mixture of kids of all ages being tormented for things such as their race, gender identity, sexuality, mental illness, and other forms of neurological diversity that consider them a target.
In case you aren’t convinced, here are some examples/statistics about this new wave of bullying:
- According to an HRC survey, LGBT kids are twice as likely as likely as their peers to say that they have been physically assaulted, kicked, or shoved at.
- There’s no doubt that racial bullying has been increasing year by year, but according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, minority students have experienced an increased amount of racial bullying ever since the start of the 2016 presidential election.
- A California art teacher described a fifth-grader who had begun having “full-blown panic attacks.” After fellow students in Washington state had repeatedly shouted slurs from their cars at one Muslim teenager, her teacher reported, the girl expressed suicidal thoughts.
- According to PACER, children with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their non-disabled peers.
Other than the physical abuse, other forms of torment often bloom through social media. For example, the emergence of ‘finstas’ (fake Instagram where you post your honest thoughts/feelings and show your friends on the finsta community who you are outside of your public Instagram account) has allowed easy access for cyber bullying. Most people who use finsta may agree with my claim, considering finsta posts often contain someone throwing shade at someone else in the school. And this shade isn’t light at all. These posts usually consist of girls calling other girls “worthless whores”, or body shaming them when that girl does something they don’t like. Now although finsta accounts are usually private, the word will always spread around. To most people, these online attacks can seem like harmless, petty fights; but these poisonous posts can escalate real quickly, especially when it gives boys an outlet to call other girls misogynist slurs.
And these online disputes aren’t limited to just Instagram; Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all outlets in which teens can use to type vicious threats that they wouldn’t dare say in person. “But that’s not cyber bullying, they’re just being stupid kids.” But you see, that’s not the point. The point is that bullying, whether it’s online or in person, is increasingly becoming more dangerous and we’re allowing it to happen. It doesn’t matter if we’ve created this idea that harassment isn’t bullying, and that the victim is “just a pussy”, this harassment shouldn’t be happening at all. Ever.
Before you like that finsta post labeling another girl a “whore”, or laugh at the slur that’s being thrown at your friend in the hallway, ask yourself this: was it really all that funny?
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