Peer victimization as a social behavior between children and their peers has become of paramount importance within education institutes. Two Canadian literature pieces, Cat’s Eye and The Shape of a Girl, were able to highlight the psychological pain inflicted onto others through bullying. In Cat’s Eye by author Margaret Atwood, Elaine Risley, remembers her childhood memories of a relationship with a bully, and how it affected her life and changed her from a weak girl into a strong woman. The Shape of a Girl by playwright Joan MacLeod, tells audiences a short story between a victim and a bully, Braidie. As a result of the destructive psychological effects caused by bullying, many individuals were forced to live a life in complete fear. However, the ways people cope with these situations are significantly different. Many victims tend to hold these repressed emotions deep inside their heart, producing psychological injuries. From literature, it can also be identified that a bully may also suffer from similar psychological pain as a victim, but struggles to find a way to deal with their pain, resulting in an endless chain of peer victimization. Understanding from both a victim and bully’s perspective, it can be finally understood that these very different characters have personalities that essentially parallels.
Being bound by the tormentors of their lives, victims are unable to break free of the chain holding them back from discovering themselves. An unfortunate victim of bullying, Elaine Risley was portrayed by Margaret Atwood to show qualities of fear and her struggle for individuation, “I’m having that trouble myself now; too close to a mirror and I’m a blur, too far back and I can’t see the details.” (Atwood 15) With the weakenin...
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...ound by a bully, victims are unable to escape the endless loop. Bullies on the other hand, do not even bother to understand a victim’s suffering. However, while bullies may have their own reasoning behind their display of power, their mindset is actually quite similar to a victim. The destructive psychological effects inflicted onto others creates unfortunate victims that cope with situations differently, some stay silent while others inflict more pain onto others. While modern literature such as Cat’s Eye and The Shape of a Girl only highlights the endless loop of the decay in the education system, a journey for self-individuation is the solution that is required for both victim and bully to end the outrageous trend.
Works Cited
MacLeod, Joan. The Shape of a Girl;Jewel. Vancouver: Talon, 2002. Print.
Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.
The purpose of writing this article is to highlight the adverse effects of bullying on vulnerable individuals. Hopefully, the light shed here using Phoebe Prince story will put a halt on this vice in our school system. Playing it safe by being well mannered can only get you so far when it comes to avoiding being victimized by bullies.The key to avoid bullying as such is not to learn how to be as invisible as possible, but to learn how to stand up for oneself and have a support network that one can fall upon. The Phoebe Prince story features prominently to help students and parents understand the dynamics behind bullying and how to arrest it so that no individual gets emotionally damaged.
Rachel Simmons was amazed there were so many books regarding aggression in boys, but was unable to find any books on the subject of girls’ aggression. The experiments that were conducted regarding aggression were also only performed using males. Many psychologists considered aggression to be behavior such as hitting, punching, name calling and threatening others as a male issue. Simmons discovered from the many interviews she conducted on women that aggression is just as much a female issue. In her book, “The Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls”, Simmons interviews many women and girls who were victims of bullying, were the actual bully, and also people who witnessed the abuse. Simmons’ purpose for writing this book was to make everyone aware of the secretive way girls bully each other, and to show how they hide their aggression, which many times is the result of their own struggle for acceptance. This book was effective because Simmons also gives the reader suggestions to help everyone involved in some form of aggressive behavior know how to deal with this behavior, and the lifelong consequences it has on everyone involved.
Author, Marge Piercy, introduces us to a young adolescent girl without a care in the world until puberty begins. The cruelty of her friends emerges and ultimately she takes her own life to achieve perfection in “Barbie Dolls” (648). At the time when all children are adjusting to their ever changing bodies, the insults and cruelties of their peers begin and children who were once friends for many years, become strangers over night caught in a world of bullying. A child who is bullied can develop severe depression which can lead to suicide; and although schools have been educated in recognizing the signs of bullying, there is an epidemic that has yet to be fully addressed within our schools or society.
Though anyone can become vulnerable to bullying, there are some commonalties between the victims. Bullies are inclined to choose a certain type of person to abuse. Typically, people who are not as strong as them. “Victims of bullying are often younger, smaller, or weaker- physically or emotionally – than their tormentors” (“Bullying” 1). Targets of bullies almost always stand out for this sole reason. They tend to wear glasses, have flaws on their face, or have a body that isn’t considered perfect by society. Sometimes, they are bullied due to their achievements. Obviously, victims of bullying are not fond of the harassment they receive. They are subjected to unwanted name calling and teasing. “I don’t want this. I don’t want people picking on me and I don’t want to be fat…I just want to be me” (Hall 222). When children are constantly abused they lose their identity. Victims are repeatedly referred to as a name that they get into the habit of it…eventually forgetting who they really are. Clearly, for once, they wish to find that person they once were – instead of being somebody a bully has made t...
The word “bullying” can be defined as the use of superior strength or influence to intimidate someone, typically to force him or her to do what one wants. In the novel Nineteen Minutes, written by Jodi Picoult, the high school students prove the definition to be true. The forms and effects of bullying have no real limit, but are always going to be negative. Children, or even adults being bullied is extremely common, and can often get out of hand. A lot of the times there nothing is done to prevent bullying, which is a huge mistake that should be corrected as soon as it could be. Through the extremely emotion filled novel, Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult goes deep into the face of a small town to find out what it means to be truly different in society. Jodi Picoult uses the social issue of teenage bullying to create a realistic story about the effects of verbal and physical abuse, leading to a tragedy for society. This novel is a great example of how bullying no only affects the people who are involved, but many others as well. Bullying in teenage children not only has an effect on themselves and their peers, but on society as whole.
Firstly, what is defined as socially acceptable is unstable and unachievable. In The Shape of a Girl, the protagonist Braidie describes the reasoning by which the bullies pick their targets: “Because she is big, because she likes that boy. Because she is brown and she lost their book; because she doesn’t fit and she lies” (Macleod, 50). The victim in this quote is singled out because she differs from societal norms; not only is she a minority in her environment, she also does not fit into the idealized body image. Parallelism is used to describe the variety of reasons others use to bully the victim, emphasizing how different she is from other students. However, the students are constantly pointing out new flaws, as they are trying to find new excuses to bully her. The oppressors make ...
The documentary film Bully (2011) – directed by Lee Hirsh – takes the viewer into the lives of five families that live in various, predominantly remote, towns across the United States. All families presented have been affected by bullying, either because their child was at the time being bullied by peers at school or the child committed suicide due to continuous bullying. The film also profiles an assistant principle, Kim Lockwood, whose indiscreetness makes the viewer...
“Learning How Bullying Happens In Order To Prevent It” by Ariana Figueroa gives facts and statistics about how who, and why some students are being bullied. Youth Truth Student Survey, a nonprofit organization, took a survey of more than 180,000 students. The students were in 5th- 12th grade. Of those students. "73% said they were verbally abused, 53% socially, 28% physically, and 23% online." Ariana Figueroa tells how the survey showed that most of the harassment happens in person. Also showing, that people who don’t identify with a gender are more likely to receive the harassment. Youth Truth also asked the students why they thought they were being bullied. When answering the students said that they felt “how they looked was one of the reasons.
Dracic, Sabaha. "Bullying And Peer Victimization ." Materia Socio Medica 21.4 (2009), 216-219. Academic Search Complete. Web. 9 Feb. 2014
Olweus, D. (1984). Aggressors and their victims: Bullying at school. In N. Fmde & H. Gault
Thesis statement: Approximately three thousand people get bullied everyday, and at some point in our life we got bullied, even though not everyone is the same, for some other people their situation is worse.
In November of 2012, a 14 year old girl committed suicide in Canada after receiving numerous threats from 2 of her classmates because of a “falling out” in the girls' relationship. This past year, a freshman at Rutgers University took his own life after a video revealing his true sexuality was discovered and put onto a commonly known website for all the university to see. The well known “Columbine Shootings” shocked the world because the shooters were said to have been picked on and bullied in school. The effects of bullying, even in one’s childhood, can haunt them forever: “Sometimes, a whisper in an elementary school classroom can echo for decades. A threat called out in a middle school hallway can cling to the subconscious into adulthood. And an insecurity exploited in a high school cafeteria can redefine a future” (Johnson 1). It’s clearly obvious that bullying can take lives and torture the people whom loved the victims of such cruelty. People, not just kids and teenagers, but people are bullied everyday across the world.
In a CNN study by Chuck Hadad he states “That bullying is pervasive even though the schools have anti-bullying programs from kindergarten through 12th grade, assemblies throughout the year, and a peer-to-peer program where older students talk to younger students about the dangers of bullying” (Hadad). Robert Faris, a sociologist found that bullies and victims are generally the same person. Whe...
“"If bullying is every single mean thing that happens, then there's nothing we can do to stop it," says Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones.” (pg. 8).
Thesis: Bullying is a serious problem in our society today. The victims of bullying are not the problem, the bullies are.