Tori Robertson: The Effects Of Bullying

If you happen to be the bystander, your success comes from knowing not to get involved or not to get too involved, lest you yourself become an actual bully or a victim. You may even be blessed with the cherished gift of self-denial, and in such case, you are able to dismiss any vague notions that your inaction makes you complicit in the bully's trespass. Still you are human: you have an opinion, you have feelings about the matter. Maybe you sympathize with one of the sides. Maybe you wish you had the guts to be that way. Maybe you're just afraid you'll get hurt. Maybe you have something to lose; maybe that something is so valuable you're not willing to gamble it. Maybe you simply feel guilty for not getting involved. Or, maybe all you feel is relief -- relief that it's not you. Makes no difference, the bystander just stands there. Hence the name. Oh, you may be emotionally conflicted, but being a bystander is really the safest place to be. Consequently, bystanders often opt to remain bystanders.

People may not realize it, but bystanders play a huge role in bullying. By not stepping in or telling someone about it, they are making the problem worse. A bystander intervening could stop someone from getting hurt, and even prevent bullying from happening in the future. If a bystander does not say or do anything about it, they are contributing to the issue. There are more bystanders than there are bullies, so it is their choice to help or hurt the situation.

A bystander today, will normally stand-up for the victim, or report the situation to a superior. A bystander in the 2010s have been well informed about the causalities that occur due to bullying, or how the victim reacts due to the bullying. The victim in the 2010s would normally report the situations themselves, or stand-up to the bully. Some victims will keep the bullying to themselves, but that is different compared to the bully keeping the bullying to him or herself. The emotions created from being bullied will cause the victim to become suicidal, or

The bully is normally very well known; someone who is just as, if not more, guilty is nearly undetectable. This person is a bystander, and according to Tales of Bullying, being a bystander is just as bad as bullying. Bystanders just join in on the laughing. They don’t even help; they just watch bullying like it’s some sort of comedy show. Bystanders can also be people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They can just as easily turn into a person who stands up to bullies, but they don’t. In the end bystanders are just as, if not more, guilty than the

In the image above, a scene of bullying is shown. Notice everyone surrounding the fight, nobody making an effort to stop it. Sometimes bystanders can be as responsible as the bully in certain situations, as they observe, encourage and enable him or her. They fear that if they stand up to the bully, that they would be bullied too. In the book “Flowers for Algernon”, many people had the opportunity to stand up for Charlie, but instead they either kept quiet or joined the

To begin with, bystanders choose not to help the victim. According to Source 4, they just stand by and watch. They usually do this because they are afraid to get in trouble or become bullied too. This tells the victim that they don't matter and that this is okay. Making the victim feel upset may cause them to harm their self or even become a bully. If someone does decide to help the bully out, the bystander will exclude them from their group of friends. That is how bystander choose not to help the bully.

Chapter three - How people can prevent bullying from happening. What can you do if you are the Bystander?

Traditional bullying used to be more common back when there was no texting or social media. Bullying consistently takes place in person: the common actions often include teasing, taunting, humiliating, and sometimes showing acts of violence. Cyberbullying takes place online making it more humiliating and intolerable for the victim since the information doesn’t go away. They both equally cause the victim emotional distress and significantly lower their confidence while the bully feels more authoritative and quite satisfied. While the fear of getting bullied grows in the victim, they start to feel unsafe and decide not to go to school. All the students deserve to attend school without the fear of getting humiliated, harassed, or bullied, but what are the bystanders and teachers doing about bullying?

Bystanders accept bullying by watching and doing nothing to resolve a conflict. Just like how the U.S. knew the Holocaust was happening but didn’t get involved. Even though no one got involved, it still contributed to the problem. It contributed to making the one causing it feel powerful.

That the need to fit in by participating doesn’t make them a bad person, that statement is of little consequence to the victims or their families. Excuses made by parents, bystanders, and the community no longer hold up in a legal setting. Hearing anti-bullying messages from the different adults in their lives can reinforce the message for kids that bullying is unacceptable. More than half of bullying situations (57%) stop when a peer intervenes on behalf of the student being bullied (Hawkins, Pepler, & Craig, 2001. Prevention is

Most of the incident in regards with bullying are either online or on campus. When it occurs in campus most of the students surrounding the occasion of when bullying occurs become the bystanders and prefer not to take action upon it to try to avoid being in it when since the beginning the teens were already part of the problem. The teens believe that being part of the problem is when their is a verbal accusation and believe that just watching the bullying occur will avoid the teen from being involved in the situation. In the survey the students were asked if one of their friends have been bullied and if they were a bystander. Surprisingly 628 students said that seeing bullying and stopping the problems was not a part of the teens experience in high school. In the other hand only 247 students said that they were bystanders. Usually when a teen becomes the bystanders it's to entertain the crowd of kids around causing the bully to feel more in power of the

The sad truth about bullying, is that although people express opinions of distaste for bullying, most people do not engage in helping behavior and intercede in the situation where this is occurring (Cowie, 2014). A study conducted by Atlas and Pepler (1998) showed how accurate this fact is. 60 scenarios of bullying involving elementary school children were videotaped. The results found that in only 10% of the scenarios a bystander engaged in prosocial behavior and helped the victim, which is a shockingly low percentage. Many other cases have revealed similar results regarding defenders in bullying situations (Evans & Smokowski, 2015).

During times of conflict, such as bullying, keeping quiet and being a bystander is never a good idea. Because if you do not speak out against a bully, you end up giving the bully more power which he/ she will use to harass more, weaker people. Now imagine this on a larger scale. Imagine you see a seemingly innocent man in a creepy alley way, in the bad part of town, being pushed and shoved around and the situation looks like it will soon escalate. Instead of being

About twenty-eight percent of student’s ages 12-18 reported being bullied at school during the school year according to the Indicators of School Crime and Safety report, by the Bureau of Justice statistics. Across thirty-nine states survey, 7.2 percent of students admit to not attending school because they do not feel safe. The importance of bullying can’t be undermined. Teachers and parents must understand the importance of looking and listening for signs and behaviors of bullying. This will help tackle the issue before it gets serious and someone gets hurt.

Bullying, a form of aggression, can be experienced in several forms: physical, verbal, social or cyber. All bullying is composed of three specific concepts—causing their victims harm, possessing greater power than their victims and repetition (Oh & Hazler, 2009). Most often it is just the bully and a victim taken into consideration yet this fails to identify a key influence: bystanders. It is their impact on bullying that creates serious problems thus understanding the bystander’s role is vital in trying to decrease the occurrence of bullying (Oh & Hazler, 2009).