Zach Wolfe #17 Speech

3.2 million kids are bullied each year. This massive number leads to horrific consequences throughout America in the act of depression, suicide, and other extreme behaviors.  In the documentary Bully, two of the fives teens that are covered commit suicide. Bullying affects everyone our age, whether you personally bully someone, you are the victim, or you know someone involved with bullying. Kids aren’t the only reason bullying continues to grow in this country. Adults have to shoulder some of the responsibility. In order to solve this problem, we need to educate children on the effects of bullying and adults need to show more concern for kids who are bullied.

                 Imagine you’re walking to class with one of your friends and he or she tells you that they just failed the last history test. If you say something like, “you’re so dumb,” you are now a bully. Bullying doesn’t have to be relentless verbal abuse or beating someone up every day. Even the little things like teasing and name calling are considered bullying. If anything, these behaviors can eventually lead to bigger problems such as physical altercations as well as verbal threats. If kids do bully each other, they can lead to extreme consequences. For example, the tragic shooting at Heath High School here in Paducah, Kentucky was a direct result of bullying. The shooter, Michael Carneal, used to be picked on for being small and weak among other things. His anger eventually boiled over after kids started spreading rumors about him being gay. This is an example of how bullying grows over time, and a shooting is just one consequence. Over 2,000 kids commit suicide every year in the United States after being victimized by bullying. Ty Smalley was one of the kids that committed suicide in Bully, and he was only eleven years old. After one kid had picked on him for a majority of the school year, Ty finally stood up for himself which ended with him being suspended by the school. Nothing happened to the bully, so Ty shot himself because he felt helpless. So now I ask you this; what if one of your classmates killed themselves? How would you feel if one of your peers took their own life because you were mean to them? Suicide is a very real problem in our country. It’s the third leading cause of death among teenagers. Not only are there those who commit suicide, but there are an additional 160,000 high schoolers who stay home every day because they are afraid of being bullied, which leads me to my next point.

                Adults are very ineffective in preventing bullying. We as students have heard our entire lives that if we have a problem, we should talk to an adult and they can help us. How often does that actually work? Another one of the kids in Bully is named Alex. He is constantly being punched, stabbed, and verbally abused every day at school. He gained the confidence to talk to his parents about the bullying and how much it bothered him. His parents took Alex’s problem to the school’s administration and the Assistant Principal told them that there was no problem at all. She told Alex’s parents that the other students were “as good as angels”. Here in Fayette County, we have a so-called “anonymous” bullying-report system. However, if a bully is reported, it’s usually pretty obvious who reported them. This just causes them to target their victim even more, and even if the victim wasn’t the one who reported it, the bully will still go after them. One time when I was in middle school, I was reported for calling another student named Dimitri gay. I only did this as retaliation of him doing the same thing to me. In order to settle our conflict, we were placed in peer mediation with a couple of 8^th graders instead of dealing with the counselor. The mediation did nothing for us and we continued to call each other names on a daily basis. Our counselor didn’t even seem concerned when we were both sent to the office for a second time. She talked to us for about fifteen minutes and then we went back to class with no consequences. Eventually, we both got over it and we became friends but what if the bullying had continued? What if it progressed to the point where I wasn’t giving this speech today? It would all be because no adults took the initiative to fix the problem when it started. Instead, students are forced to rely on the ability to solve conflicts on their own.

                As you can see, students bully others without really knowing the consequences. This can lead to bigger problems such as deaths. Adults aren’t always the best help either, which is why students can feel helpless like Ty and Alex. With education and a greater emphasis intervening, bullying can become less of a problem in America, and schools can become about learning again.