Bullies and Their Victims
Bullying is a serious and growing problem.
The February issue of People magazine features the story of 16-year-old Phoebe Prince who recently moved with her mother and sister from Ireland to Massachusettes.
She attended South Hadley High School where she endured relentless taunting at the school and on Facebook.
There does not appear to have been anything substantive that lead her female peers to treat her so badly, rather she accepted a date from another female peer's boyfriend.
It was not the first time that a student endured unrelenting and abusive bullying at this particular school as the story goes.
Phoebe committed suicide in January by hanging herself at home.
Bullying behavior was mentioned recently by a local county police chief who indicated that it is such a problem on the force that he does not hesitate to practice zero tolerance followed by reprimand and/or firing.
Internationally, Victoria Legal Aid in Melbourne Australia issues a lengthy policy and procedures manual on identifying and managing workplace bullying.
Bullying behavior can take the form of verbal abuse such as insults and name-calling, racial slurs, criticism intending to crush another person's spirit.
It can be physical--hitting, shoving, and punching, or sexually suggestive innuendo.
Bullying can also be relational in that it attempts to diminish another person's sense of worth.
It is addictive in its power to elevate the bully over the bullied and to maintain at all costs the subjugation of the target or targets.
In the international bestseller, "The Bully, The Bullied, and the Bystander" author Barbara Coloroso does a thorough job of identifying what constitutes bullying and its devastating effects on children, adolescents, families, and entire schools and communities.
Think Columbine on a smaller scale, or larger, depending on the latest statistics, and just as fraught with the possibility of danger.
Whatever form bullying takes, it seeks to intimidate, dominate, and often terrorize another or others by repeated acts of humiliation, aggression, rejection, isolation, and violence.
There is growing and near-universal intolerance, known as zero tolerance, for bullying and other types of behavior that render work and school environments vulnerable to flash anger, intolerance of others simply because they don't clique with the cliques.
Learning respect for self and others, rejecting stereotypes, tolerating differences and mustering the courage to stop bullying in its tracks by those who witness it or know it is happening are just several important pieces in dealing with the problems of bullying and its poisonous effects.
The February issue of People magazine features the story of 16-year-old Phoebe Prince who recently moved with her mother and sister from Ireland to Massachusettes.
She attended South Hadley High School where she endured relentless taunting at the school and on Facebook.
There does not appear to have been anything substantive that lead her female peers to treat her so badly, rather she accepted a date from another female peer's boyfriend.
It was not the first time that a student endured unrelenting and abusive bullying at this particular school as the story goes.
Phoebe committed suicide in January by hanging herself at home.
Bullying behavior was mentioned recently by a local county police chief who indicated that it is such a problem on the force that he does not hesitate to practice zero tolerance followed by reprimand and/or firing.
Internationally, Victoria Legal Aid in Melbourne Australia issues a lengthy policy and procedures manual on identifying and managing workplace bullying.
Bullying behavior can take the form of verbal abuse such as insults and name-calling, racial slurs, criticism intending to crush another person's spirit.
It can be physical--hitting, shoving, and punching, or sexually suggestive innuendo.
Bullying can also be relational in that it attempts to diminish another person's sense of worth.
It is addictive in its power to elevate the bully over the bullied and to maintain at all costs the subjugation of the target or targets.
In the international bestseller, "The Bully, The Bullied, and the Bystander" author Barbara Coloroso does a thorough job of identifying what constitutes bullying and its devastating effects on children, adolescents, families, and entire schools and communities.
Think Columbine on a smaller scale, or larger, depending on the latest statistics, and just as fraught with the possibility of danger.
Whatever form bullying takes, it seeks to intimidate, dominate, and often terrorize another or others by repeated acts of humiliation, aggression, rejection, isolation, and violence.
There is growing and near-universal intolerance, known as zero tolerance, for bullying and other types of behavior that render work and school environments vulnerable to flash anger, intolerance of others simply because they don't clique with the cliques.
Learning respect for self and others, rejecting stereotypes, tolerating differences and mustering the courage to stop bullying in its tracks by those who witness it or know it is happening are just several important pieces in dealing with the problems of bullying and its poisonous effects.
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