Dealing with Bullying
Steve Thompson
BSHS/325
December 13, 2012
Dr. Linda J. Johnson, N.C.C.

Dealing with Bullying

Bullying has been an issue that many children have dealt with in some aspect or another. Whether the child being the bully or being on the receiving end of being bullied by someone else, bullying “is an epidemic that causes 160,000 children a day to stay home from school because they are afraid of being bullied, according to the US Department of Education” (Dubreuil & McNiff, 2010). This epidemic is affecting the lives of numerous children all through out the United States. Bullying has recently become a more popular topic due to national media coverage of the tragic deaths of a few teens recently that have taken their lives due to being bullied. “The National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center estimates that nearly 30 percent of American youth are either a bully or a target of bullying.” (Donaldson James, 2009)
We must first examine why studying bullying is such an important aspect of the study in human development. Bullying in the teenage years can be very detrimental to the individual both psychologically and physically. Bullying can be something as simple as name calling to inappropriate sexual comments, threating to cause harm, physical violence such as pushing, shoving, hitting, spitting on and even kicking. Many teens that have been bullied have been known to shut down and become withdrawn from society. While some teens withdraw themselves from society some use other methods to cope with the abuse with the use of alcohol, food, pills, and illegal drugs in order to numb themselves from the pain that they have inside.
As we examine bullying in more detail we see that bullying can be broken down into different components. Verbal Bullying, Physical Bullying and Cyber Bullying. Verbal Bullying can be seen as one of the