Themes in Destroying Avalon Essay

The book Destroying Avalon by, Kate McCaffrey is a great children's novel about online bullying and how one little thing can get around so fast. The main character is Avalon, who moves to the city her life is turned upside down. Starting at a new high school she is very nervous, anxious, and a bit excited but also finds herself at the centre of a brutal cyber bullying campaign. She is inundated with obscene text messages, and subject to increasingly vicious web site postings, as things spiral out of control. Miserable and isolated. Avalon relies on a small group of new friends. But as the threats escalate, is anyone safe?.

This novel was set during the post war period, this was a time when independence and rebelling against parents and law was more important than doing the right thing, during these times of independence, and teenagers needed friendship more than anything else.

Bullying is very common in most schools in the United States Around three million United States students miss class every month just because of bullying. When Alex Libby shared his story he gave a voice to millions of children who suffer from bullying, because he shared his story it changed the way most people think of the effects of bullying. An example of bullying is there was a girl named Kelby Johnson who was mocked by teachers and students because she was a lesbian, she had to stop playing basketball because her ignorant teammates didn’t want to be near her. Alex Libby is one of the 13 million school children in the United States that is being bullied. Alex’s mom said “ Kid’s back in the day, could go home and be safe you can’t do that a lot now, now you can get bullied online.”

In “Phoebe Prince: Should School Bullying Be a Crime?”, an article written by journalist Jessica Bennet addresses school bullying, the outcomes and the consequences that bullies deserve or not. Above all, this article aims the spotlight on bullying, a 15-year-old who took her own life due to harassment, torment, rumors, physical threats all leading it to being bullied by well-known good students. In any case, the process of being bullied has never been taken into consideration nor importance in the school system or by society in general. “It’s even gotten better over the past decade says Dan Olweus, a leading bullying expert”. However, bullying just does not disappear, it is still an issue that humankind does not have any diligence to the cause

Foul language, gang violence, rivalries, dysfunctional families, underage drinking, and drug abuse at a young age are all examples of things a teen should not learn about. Children or teens can be immature and take the examples of things within the book the wrong way and use it to their advantage. Overall, this book should be on the banned book list and not be read by

The novel explores the damaging effects of bullying, peer pressure and the dynamics of group interaction within teenagers in a modern day society.

Every teen will fear isolation in some portion of their lives and bullying is one theme that can lead to isolation. In the novel, The Loser’s Club by John Lekich, a fictional novel revolving around the persistent theme of bullying. The main conflict impacts a group of individuals stereotyped as “Losers” based on the antagonist’s opinion. The protagonist, Alex Sherwood is an individual who is impacted by the negation of bullying from Jerry Whitman’ gang. The persistent message of the novel explains the teen’s fear of speaking up. Lekich chose Alex Sherwood as a character with a disability and who felt isolated from his family to stand up against the students that were bullying him. Alex declared “‘Don’t do that, Whitman,’ I said -not

“Scotty Richey … killed himself on his sixteenth birthday … nobody could understand about Scotty … But the way I see it is, he just didn’t have anybody. … It was like we were all the animals on Noah’s ark that came in pairs, except of his kind there was only one” (Kingsolver 132-4). In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees, Taylor mentions to Estevan her classmate Scotty Richey’s suicide. She explains that although her school had a very distinct social hierarchy, people within a class had each other for company. Scotty, however, had nobody. As a result of the extreme isolation he faced, he committed suicide. Today, bullying is a developing issue in the world and exclusion, which Scotty faced, is just one of many forms of bullying. What Scotty experienced in the novel occurs in schools around the world, and the consequences are unimaginable and horrific. In light of the increasingly advanced technology developed in recent years, cyberbullying has become a more common form of bullying among students. Cyberbullying, or bullying that occurs through the internet or media, happens due to the courage that bullies acquire by not having to physically face their victims. The harassment the victims experience lead to mental as well as physical health issues, which often times leads to suicide. In order to prevent such grave repercussions, education systems and parents must teach kids how to behave properly on the

Mistakes can seriously impact the people who make them; however, the effects are not always negative. In the book, Whirligig, by Paul Fleischman, a teenage boy named Brent is the new kid in town and he faces some major problems with his peers. After being pushed around, treated like a pawn, and utterly rejected, Brent tries to commit suicide by taking his hands off the wheel of his moving car. Although Brent’s attempt is not successful, his actions still have a tragic ending- Lea, a young, kind, beautiful girl, is unlucky enough to be in the car that Brent crashes into. The car accident results in Lea’s death, but also the start of Brent’s magical journey of redemption. Brent’s task is to travel to the four corners of the country, build

1) Avalon receives messages from a sender named “friend” this is ironic because the sender is abusing and insulting her online. So gives a very unusual meaning to the name.

Cyber bullying and face-to-face bullying are to major concerns in today’s society, the movie Mean Girls and the novel Destroying Avalon have themes about bullying in them. The texts show us how more people can be affected by certain types of bullying as well as how it can change behaviour and how bullying can build up to physical violence.

When in the course of human events, it becomes imperative to shake off the bands of repeated name-callings and falsely given identities which have been connected for so long, and to assume that the playing field is once again even, giving your undivided attention and respect to the opinions of the unheard and abandoned as they state why they have decided to stand up against the bullying and how they plan to write how to isolate themselves from bullying altogether.

Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson novel Target accounts the life of a sixteen year old boy name Grady West . Grady was your average high school sixteen year old who hung out with a group of friends, very outgoing, and likable. But, everything changed on a tragic uneventful November night. While walking home Grady was attack, beaten, and raped. From that very moment Grady’s life changed. He would no longer became the Grady he once was to his friends, family, and even to himself. Grady tried to escape his friends, old school, and what happened that night. But, every so often the memories reoccur. A year later, he now attended Thomas Jefferson High where no one would know who he was and what had happened to him. His journey at his new school is

In this newspaper article, the author helps the reader understand and how to treat cyber bullying. The author explains what bullying is and how it is modernized to become cyber bullying. The article informs the reader of main point, in a brief but effective description about recognizing and treating cyber bullying. The author show great statistical research on her topic but not enough the emotional appeal. It provides good use to my research because of the extensive use on how it should be treated.

We use technology in almost every aspect of our daily lives; it is how we stay connected in this fast-paced world. Technology provides many benefits, but it has the potential to destroy many people. With technology use on the rise, bullying has taken a new, more destructive form. Cyberbullying, as defined by the Cyberbullying Research Center, is the willful and repeated harm inflicted through the medium of electronic text (qtd. in Chait). Cyberbullying is a serious problem and has serious consequences.