Essay: History and acceptance of bullying

Bullying is unwanted and aggressive behavior among children that involves a real/perceived imbalance of power. This behavior actually has the potential to be repeated over time. Both kids who are bullied and who bully others may have serious and even everlasting problems. Conflicts between people have existed forever, but “bullying” has only been in existence since 1693. In fact, bullying wasn’t viewed as a significant problem until the 1970s. Since then, many have viewed bullying as a childhood rite of passage. It all started when Norwegian researcher and psychologist Dan Olweus published “Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys” in 1973. His argument that bullying was a big problem in schools led to many new anti-bullying policies. Schools have responded to Olweus’s warnings and have created anti-bullying policies in order to prevent any bullying incidents from occurring, even though one in four students are bullied every month. As a result, he has made a safer environment for the students overall throughout the 21st century.
Many may know what bullying is and what effect it has on people, but no one really knows how it came into existence and how it gained popularity/attention. As the 21st century came into play, people gave into mass media more easily and as we all know, the media tends to give great concern to violence and anything that may seem bizarre. High forms of violence such as assaults and murders on people usually receive the most attention from the media, but lower forms of violence such as bullying have only came into existence by the 21st century, when researchers, parents, guardians, and authority figures have addressed the effects bullying has on people. As said before the media tend to give more attention to anything violent and bizarre, and that’s basically what bullying has caused people to do. Countless number of people have gone to the extent where they had to commit suicide or even leave their families in order to get out of the psychological and physical distress they face every day from bullying. Along with that, bullying has also gained attention from the way it changes an individual. Bullying has made the people who are bullied into bullies in order to let out their distress amongst others regardless of what society thinks of them. Therefore, mass media and the effects of bullying have clearly shown what bullying is and how it may harm an individual.
Throughout history, bullying has actually been viewed as an acceptable behavior by the public. There have been many misconceptions that characterize bullying, all of which that lead to minimizing the behavior overall. For example, people say that bullying is a natural part of childhood, but in reality there’s nothing natural about being bullied. Bullying is usually considered a normal part of childhood because it’s such a common experience. Also many people say that some people deserve to be bullied, but in actuality no child’s behavior justifies being hurt or harmed in any manner. Some people do tend to think of bullying as just teasing, but really, even though most children are occasionally teased, teasing becomes bullying when the child does not understand that he or she is being teased and the intent of the action is to mostly hurt or harm the other person. Along with that, in order for people to avoid bullying they might say that ignoring bullying will make it go away, but in many cases it’s not true. This method may sound easy, but ignoring the problem will not make bullying go away. In fact, it often makes the problem worse, because it shows how the victim is unable to do anything about the behavior and as a result it lets the bully to get satisfaction from the behavior. In all of the following examples, we see that the public tends to be very bias when it comes to serious issues like bullying.
We pay attention to this concept/idea of bullying because even though bullying may sound like that it’s only harmful to the target, in reality it is harmful and has a negative influence on the bully and even the bystander. In society, bullying plays a role of a multi-layered epidemic which spreads through people in a negative way. It’s like a disease that feeds off the social acceptance and like-minded opinions of various individuals which is usually fueled by either fear or even deep pain. Nobody really knows where exactly bullying originates from, but many assumes it that it comes from hatred. Now, hatred is nothing new, but before that, in order to solve this epidemic dilemma, one needs to know that hatred is also not innate. Hatred is simply an emotion that is learned. The child may manifest hatred-like ideas from a single or even from multiple sources by watching and listening to others around them. Also places like at home, at school, on the TV, online, on the news, and even out in the world can all be starting points to which a person/child may begin showing his/her hatred personalities. Everything people see and hear has an impact, and as a result it teaches them how to relate to others in the world and more importantly, how to relate to themselves. This epidemic is the result of our society’s cruelty towards each other over the past decades and even our society’s constant craving for technology. These are also the reasons why it has desensitized us as humans from one another since nowadays, it’s easy to bully others because of the corruption in our society.
Currently, the United States consist of many organizations that go against bullying, but so far no group/organization has supported bullying. Out of the many examples, Pacer is an international company that usually helps people and children from any disorder or disability they have and also they work with kids who have been bullied and with kids who are bullies in order to prevent them from spreading harm to others. Along with that, in society, bullying is a major cause of stress and can leave anyone feeling emotionally distressed or even depressed as a result. In fact, other than kids, research shows that people do get bullied at one’s office or even at one’s workplace, and as a result, this debilitates a person into having anxiety and even post-traumatic stress disorder. As said before, Pacer and even many other organizations devoted to anti-bullying tends to help people in need, but in this case they also help the people that have been affected by bullying including the kids and adults who resulted with symptoms like depression and even other psychological disorders from bullying.