Standing up against bullying
Akeela was one of the few recipients for the anti-bullying award among all students in the Springfield area. She wrote an excellent article explaining why anti-bullying is so important and was invited to the John Legend theatre to be awarded a metal for her hard work. Nice job Akeela, we are so proud of you and the good work you are doing! Find her article below!
(The article “bullying at school” says, Bullying among schoolchildren is certainly a very old phenomenon. The fact that some children are frequently and systemically harassed and attacked by other children has been described in literary works, and many adults have personal experience of it from their own school days. Though many are aquatinted with the bully/victim problem, it was not until fairly recently, in the early 1970s, that efforts were made to study it systemically (Olweus, 1973a, 1978). For a considerable time, these attempts were largely confined to Scandinavia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, however, bullying among schoolchildren has received some public attention in Japan, England, Australia, the United States, and other countries. There are now clear indications of an increasing societal as well as research interest into bully/victim problems in several parts of the world.)
“I have been bullied half of my life. In grade school I would get bullied by a group of guys. They would call me names and follow me home while name calling. When I didn’t want to go to school I would hide in the closet until school was over. People choose to bully other people because they have been hurt before and they want other people to feel exactly how they feel and they can’t face their own problems so they point out your insecurities and pick on you. They also want to be cool and fit in.
I saw people getting pushed around when I was in grade school and I didn’t do anything about it because I was scared that if I told the bullies, they would come back on me and hurt me more that they already were. When I see something happening, I can go to an adult and tell them what is happening so it doesn’t happen anymore. I can be the voice for the people who can’t speak for themselves. I can make the world a better place again. People use suicide so they could stop being bullied but that’s not going to stop anything it’s just going to make the bullies feel stronger because you let them get the best of you.
At school, teachers can only do so much for you and to the bully and when they do something about it, they only suspend them or yell at them but everyone knows that yelling and suspension is not going to do much. It might give you a week or two of no bullying but then when they come back it gets worse. The bullies are going to whatever it takes to break you and when they do, they are going to laugh in your face. When you get bullied, your friends are going to become distant with you because they don’t want to be a target and they are going to want nothing to do with you. There are a lot of family’s out there that lose a member of their family due to bullying and they want to stop it all from happening to other families.” (Akeela Crossley, 2022)
