What Are the Effects of Bullying?

What Are the Effects of Bullying?

Bullying is a form of abuse. Physical, verbal, or anti-social behaviors and actions are also belonging to bullying; for example, gossip, exclusion and non-verbal body language. Technology improves a lot when compared with before, so cyber-bullying is more common now. There are enormous effects on the victims of being bullied: affecting learning, creating physical and mental illness and causing suicide.

Bullying and harassment can be the major distraction to learning. Victims usually suffer from low self-esteem. From the article "Words That Wound", Vail illustrates that victims will be afraid to go to the blackboard or raise their hands to answer questions (762). If they have a question and do not ask, they will accumulate more and more questions. And then when they take the test or exam, the mark will show that they have lot of questions and do not know about the content. Not only does if make their academic results poor, but also they will have less confidence because they cannot boost their confidence by studying. According to "Words That Wound", "Victims' grades suffer, and fear can lead to chronic absenteeism, truancy, or dropping out (761)"; and Vail also uses the research from the National Association of School Psychologists to show that the students stay home from school in order to avoid of being bullied (760). From the above data, we can know that victims will be affected in learning. If they stayed at home or dropped out from school, they cannot have lectures in school so they may not be able to learn as much knowledge as other students.

Apart from the learning effect, they will endure physical and mental illness from bullying. Based on the article "What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince", a couple of girls and boys called Phoebe a "whore" in the cafeteria and put awful postings on Facebook or Twitter (Bazelon 5,6). In the case of Phoebe Prince, after being assaulted by verbal bullying from her peers, she does self-mutilation to herself, which means trying to transfer the pain from emotional to physical pain. One of the boys, who had seen Phoebe's cuts, said, "She lifted up her hoodie and showed cuts on her chest above her bra and all the way down to her hips" (Bazelon 7). That is a great example to know that bullying can cause physical harm. For mental illness, there are several examples. In the article "Words That Wound", the examples of Martha Rizzo and Anna Billoit show that children feel unhappier because they cannot tell others about being bullied not even teachers or parents, as children think that the adults cannot help (761). Even teachers and other adults witness someone being bullied in the open; however, they do not help the victims to get out of them being bullied. Another article "Facebook, the Mean Girls and Me" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, explains the author may suffer from Stockholm syndrome, which means falling in love with torturers. Akner checks