- What are some other extreme scenarios that can happen at a result of bullying?
- Each of these cases could've been prevented somehow. Who can be at fault for allowing this school violence and these school shootings to occur?
- There are many anti-bullying programs in schools everywhere, but they seem to be ineffective. What are some other ways that school violence and bullying can be prevented?
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Some Questions to Think About While Reading
Bullying Backlash
This article provides you with a great reason on why a student who is bullied may have aggression which could lead to school violence. The kids who are bullied are often scared to tell anyone what is going on because of many reasons. That will leave them with no one to help them or give them advice on how to handle their situation. Then, they will go to their own measures on how to solve the problem, which usually doesn’t turn out very well. It will usually result in some kind of school violence because the kid just keeps getting angrier and angrier until they finally explode and go crazy. The child going crazy is what will lead to their aggression and to school violence. According to this scholarly article by James Unnever and Dewey Cornell, a student can be bullied in a few ways. The first way you know a student is being bullied is when other students say mean or hurtful things to the victim or call the victim mean or hurtful names. The second way is when other students ignore the victim purposely or leave them out of things. The next way is when a student or students hit, kick, or shove the victim. The last way is when students spread lies or false rumors about the victim. Most victims often refuse to tell anyone that they are being bullied. Therefore, teachers or any other kind of authority is unable to take the appropriate action and stop the bullying from happening. A victim seeking help is crucial. It reduces the probability of being victimized in the future. The victim refuses to report the bullying for a number of reasons. Sometimes too little attention is given to the victim who is reporting the bullying. It could also cause the victim to experience embarrassment or shame. The victim could be scared that if they tell on their bully that the bully will get in trouble and it will force the bully to retaliate again in some kind of way. Male victims are less likely to report that they are being bullied than a female. Also, students who are older are less likely to report that they are being bullied than younger students. One study showed that seventy-five percent of bully-victims did tell someone they were being bullied, while the other twenty-five percent of students refused to tell anyone. The second study showed similar results with twenty-nine percent of students refusing to tell anyone. This is terrible that nearly one-fourth of students will not tell anyone. The kids who don’t tell anyone are never going to get help and they will never be able to resolve their problem with bullying. Since the students are not getting any kind of help at all they are finding other solutions to their problems. They could show signs of social withdrawal, which can make them crazy. According to the article, research shows that victims will show a range of aggressiveness from somewhat passive aggression to very harmful aggression. Bully-victims tend to show symptoms and behavior such as irritability, restlessness, and anger and that leads to aggressive behavior. Another study was done using the Aggressive Attitudes scale. This scale included: “If a kid threatens you, it is ok to hit them” and, “It feels good when I hit someone.” The responses to these two statements ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree. They summed and standardized the scores. The standardized coefficient for the Aggressive Attitude scale was 0.79. This article just shows how bully-victims are scared to tell anyone about their problems with bullying, and therefore they use their own methods to solve their problem, which leads to aggression and school violence.
Bullying Leads to Aggressive Behavior
The first scholarly article we have about the backlash of bullying is called Teasing, Rejection, and Violence: Case Studies of the School Shootings. It is an article from Wiley Online Library by Mark R. Leary, Robin M. Kowalski, Laura Smith, and Stephen Phillips. The concern of students, teachers, parents, and the public with school violence is increasing rapidly. In the past fifteen years, since 1996, about forty students have died as a result of school shootings along with several others being severely injured during these tragedies also. Many different factors are discussed when people ask why school violence occurs. The main focus of this article about Aggressive Behavior is that the role of interpersonal rejection leads to school violence. Interpersonal rejection means bullying between two people.
Those who are bullied get the unspoken message from the bully that they are not liked, not respect, or even that they are not accepted. There is no reason for this bullying, but bullies pick out the smallest things just to single out one kid. Bullying is also done publicly to cause public humiliation to get more people on the “same side” as the bully. Public attacks may even cause more trouble for the victim because the bully not only shows that they don’t like the victim, but they do it in front of other kids to make it hurt even more.
Rejection mainly occurs in three different forms. The three different forms are teasing someone, singling someone out, and romantic rejection. In the Columbine incident in Columbine, Colorado the shooters were kids who fell victim to bullying. They were taunted and humiliated by other kids at the school. Eventually they snapped and reversed roles. The once victims were now the bullies, and shot the one time bullies and turned them in to victims. This is an example of social rejection, keeping someone from being able to fit in. According to this article studies show that peer rejection and aggressive behavior have a strong linear relationship. This shows why kids who are bullied tend to act out aggressively against either the bullies, or an innocent bystander. That is one of the many examples that link bullying to school violence. Although it is what’s most seen in the media and stressed to all, most kids who are socially rejected do not always turn to a sort of physical violence, or lethal violence. The most extreme cases are the ones who turn in to violence.
On December 1, 1997, a fourteen-year-old came into school armed with a semiautomatic pistol and killed three people. The young man being called a “faggot” because of his sexual orientation caused all this. They published in the school newspaper an article calling him “gay”. This article has 34 similar articles of kids who were bullied that were also the perpetrators of the school shootings. This certainly is not all of them. This article shows the correlation between kids who were bullied, and how leads to backlashes that cause school violence.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ab.10061/pdf
Virginia Tech
The shooter of the worst mass school shooting in our nation’s history did so because he was pushed to a breaking point. In an article from MSNBC news, classmates claim vouch that Seung-Hui Cho was under constant ridicule from classmates. A senior at Virginia Tech, Cho’s bullying dates all the way back to his high school days where his fellow classmates often made fun of him due to his shyness and strange way that he talked. One student, Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech student who also graduated with Cho from Westfield High School, recalled upon a time in English class where everyone had to read aloud and that when it came time for Cho to read he refused until the teacher threatened to give him a failing grade for participation. When Cho began to read he did so in a deep voice that sounded there was something in his mouth. This resulted in a thunderous laugh from his classmates followed by some of them pointing at him and telling him to go back to China. When undergoing constant heckling for such things as his speech it is no wonder why Cho barely ever opened his mouth and tried to avoid striking up conversation with others as much as possible. Among some of the other strange things Cho did to alienate himself from others were things such as, on the first day of a literature class, on the sign in sheet he signed himself in as a question mark. From this, students bestowed upon him the nickname “the question mark kid.” In the article in states that the day of Cho’s massacre, he mailed in a multimedia package to NBC News. The package consisted of different texts, photographs and a video. In which Cho to rant on and on in explicit hatred towards all of the people (without disclosing names) who had done him wrong in the past. The package also added to the portrait that many people had of Cho as a lonely, solitary man that never was able to manage normal social interactions. With that said, it surely didn’t warrant the constant criticism that Cho had received over the years. In the video that Cho had sent he claims that when the time had come to carry out with his plans he felt that he “had to do it.” This suggests that he felt that there was no other way to deal with the situation and that he felt that he had been forced into a corner and there was only one way to get out of it. Seung-Hui Cho was a very unique individual, who, after consistent bullying year after year, finally snapped. What resulted were the worse school massacres in our nation’s history. While we should grieve for the victims, we should also take a step back and address the problem of bullying in our country and the profound effect it is having on people in our society.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18169776/
School Shooting
School Shooting
Although theft and other school violence crimes were more common, in the early twenty first century school shootings were the number one thing that students along with parents and school officials were concerned about. Before the 1990’s school shootings were very rare and therefore many schools had inadequate security systems, if any. It seems as if a lot of school administrators have a, ‘it will never happen to us,’ attitude toward a massive school violence event. Consequently, shootings in schools that could have been prevented were never stopped and small acts of bullying were overlooked and not handled correctly. In many cases bullies continued on day after day with little repercussions for their actions, if even that, and continued to push their classmates’ limits.
Nathan Ferris, an honor student, was a perfect target for a bully. He was bullied from a young age for being smart. As a twelve year old, Ferris had trouble handling the constant bullying he received at school every day. Also teased for being overweight and somewhat of a loner, Ferris had reached his limits and taken enough abuse from his bully and planned out his revenge. The night before the shooting, Ferris told his friend to not attend school the next day. Because Ferris’s warning fell on deaf ears, the shooting that could have been stopped was never reported, and the next day March, 2 1987 Nathan Ferris brought a gun to school.
Instead of running into school guns blazing, Ferris waited to be picked on before he shot. Maybe it all could have been prevented if no one had made fun of him that day, but knowing that his bully would be there, Ferris waited. Finally a classmate began to pick on him and Nathan Ferris pulled out his concealed gun and shot and killed the boy. He then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. This pertains to our topic because Nathan Ferris was bullied until he couldn’t handle it any longer. He became violent and his backlash was against the students that took pleasure in bullying him.
As a result of multiple school shootings, school violence received a lot more attention in the 1990’s. Tests were taken and people started to acknowledge the long lasting effects of bullying as well as the short term ones. Long term effects included negative social behavior and emotional development. Short term effects are low self-esteem, few friends, and low attendance in school. Many of these problems make recipients of bulling fall into depression or other lifelong problems. As a result of never being stopped for bulling, many bullies grow into very aggressive people, which could lead them into lives of violent crimes and possibly end up in jail.
Schools have taken more actions since the tragic events that occurred in past school shootings and have tightened security by making kids wear see-through backpacks, walk through metal detectors or put their bags through an x-ray machine. Many schools are also starting classes about anti-bullying or making help groups for kids that get bullied. These are positive steps to stop violence among students and ensure the safety of the kids.
http://law.jrank.org/pages/
http://law.jrank.org/pages/
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Approximately a month later is when crazy events started to unfold in Sterling. First, Peter placed a bomb inside of Matt’s car. When the bomb went off, it distracted all of the students in the school. While the students were distracted is when Peter started shooting. Peter’s main targets were Matt and his friends. He ended up killing nine students, one teacher, and wounding nineteen others. Peter was put in jail and later had a court hearing to determine his fate. Peter admitted that the endless bullying was his motivation for the shooting. He said, “It had to stop.”
This book shows how bullying can cause a kid to go crazy a commit a terrible act of school violence. There were so many different incidents of him being bullied and one day he just had enough. The backlash of his bullying caused him to go on a shooting rampage. The school violence that was started by Peter resulted in many lives being lost and many other students being wounded. Peter even admits that the endless bullying was his motivation, and he stated that it needed to stop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
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