We hear in many places that bullying is a huge problem. I see commercials on TV, my classmates and I watch videos at school, and sometimes I see the effect of bullying on some of my classmates. It is easy for us to just dismiss the problem and not think about it, but some people that have never been bullied really do not understand how important of an issue this is.

Every year, 22.5% of high school bullying victims are likely to consider suicide. Bullying affects everybody, for every suicide among young people, there are at least 100 suicide attempts. Imagine if that was your family member, then it would mean a lot more to you. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention of Abuse), suicide is the third leading cause of death of youth between the ages of 10 and 24. It results in approximately 4,400 lives lost each year. For every single one of those people, about 20 family members suffer. That is 88,000 people suffering. But seriously, why? Why do people have to die and suffer over this? Do bullies really need that much power? Classmates should be your friends not your enemies. Those who bully use power to hurt people and nobody ever asks to get hurt. Sadly, some kids can be bullied for things that they can not control like their height and size. Sometimes it does not end at school. As a matter of fact, 20.4% of high school bullying victims are likely to be physically hurt by a family member as well as a bully. Abuse from family members can be a starting point for most bullies. A lot of bullies can get mad and thrash out by taking out their anger on someone smaller than them. Also, 40.9% of middle school bullying victims are likely to intentionally harm themselves. Believe it or not, a study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shows that the bullies themselves are at greater risk of depression and anxiety, and are more likely to drop out of school or perform worse in classes than their peers. Yes, that means bullies are actually hurting themselves as well as their peers.

Bullying is a worldwide issue and although many have tried to stop it, this behavior can not be totally eradicated. One of the biggest types of bullying today is cyber bullying. Cyber bullying is when a bully verbally abuses a victim over the Internet. Cyber bullying has become such a big problem because it is very hard to track. When you are sending messages to people on a social networking site such as Facebook, nobody is there to see it except for the bully and the victim. This is what makes cyber bullying so hard to cope with day to day. With nobody to see this happening, the victim is provided with no support and gets the feeling that they are alone. One way to end cyber bullying is something that I know all tennagers do not want to hear. The solution is that the parents must monitor their child’s Internet history. Now there is a fine line between trying to help and being invasive. When you think about it, what do we teens really have to hide? I mean the National Security Agency (NSA) is already spying on us anyway.

It is hard to find anybody that is an advocate of bullying, however, there are people who do not see it as such a big problem. Too many people bully without even realizing it. Often times someone does something stupid and gets made fun of. It is all fun and games until that person starts trying to avoid people because they do not want to be made fun of. Now we have a problem. Bullying can be a harmless tease, but it is up to the victim, not the bully, to decide whether or not it is bullying. Many people use the excuse that they were asking for it, but nobody ever asks to get bullied.

Believe it or not, bullying can be minimized, if not stopped, in schools. Teachers along with students, need to go through a training program to identify bullying and develop strategies to help the victims. So much of bullying continues because teachers never do the right thing to end the problem, and sometimes they do not even realize the problem! Students should also go through about three to four assemblies a year to motivate and encourage positive behavior. If the victim’s classmates can identify bullying, then they can team up to help the victim and stop the bully. Do not be a bystander!

We all know that bullying is a huge problem, and it needs to be addressed. The program I described, the teachers taking the training and the kids going to assemblies, has the potential to end school bullying, and parents monitoring their kids with a fine line of privacy can put a massive dent in cyber bullying. If we all team up, we can end bullying in schools. So, when you read this, I ask that you please do not just dismiss this issue because every year we ignore this, and act like it is not our problem, another 4,400 kids die from bullying, and 88,000 suffer. And we can save them, we just need your help. What will you do about bullying?