Today I will discuss with you a very serious and increasingly common topic, namely the phenomenon of bullying. I say phenomenon because according to the "National Center for Education Statistics 2019", one out of every five persons (20.2%) have been bullied.
It is a phenomenon that is increasingly common among students, co-workers and strangers.
Bullying can be of many kinds, nationality, gender, colour, sexual orientation, etc. Abusive behaviour towards colleagues can also be called bullying.
How many of you have not been bullied? Either verbally, online or in any way? How many of you have felt inferior just because someone else was picking on you?
An episode of bullying took place just yesterday. One person was abused by his co-worker, verbally and threatened. All in front of their boss. We'll call the abuser X, their boss Y and the person who was abused Z.
Let's play a game of imagination.
Z was in his room, watching the show and eating fish and chips, which is true the food looked amazing and the steam from the fish ran down your nostrils leaving you with nothing but a big appetite to eat. X arrives home and walks straight into Y's room who tells him that Z said he found mistakes in the field made by X. He starts to insult Z, when he hears that he was insulted he goes to Y to ask her why he is insulted. X then angrily came out of his room and jumped out to beat Z. In short that would be the story. Now let's discuss causes and effects.
Well it seems that Z was wrong by simply reporting to Y the mistakes found in the field, and Y was wrong by telling X who reported and what he reported, According to what Y said, Z should not have left the room when he heard he was being insulted but should have let X calm down and X will not jumped into the fight. Z is also to blame for victimizing himself by shutting up and letting X jump into the fight instead of standing up for himself and being a "man".
Following these actions Z reported everything to the company and the next day was moved to a hotel room.
I ask you, should Z not have left the room and let X insult him and talk bad about him? Do you think Z is to blame?
We need to understand how serious bullying really is. Did you know that over 160,000 children every day refuse to go to school because they have been bullied? Did you know that a meta-analysis found that students facing peer victimization are 2.2 times more likely to have suicide ideation and 2.6 times more likely to attempt suicide? ( Gini&Espelage,2014).
Bullying can be verbal, social, cyberbullying, it can have many forms, but it is still bullying.
We must always think about how we can prevent bullying, how we can defend ourselves against abuse. Pay attention to your surroundings, maybe right now as you are reading this someone is being abused again. We owe it to ourselves not to turn a blind eye to such behaviour.
Today it's me, tomorrow it might be you!