Here is my essay and the guide lines for peer reivew . I believe that my weaknesses are if my sources are really worth using, trying to put my sentences together, and also my diction. I would really apreciate if you can help me out. Thank you.
Cracking Down The Laws of Bullying
By
Pandora Campbell
Professor Korman
English 102
03 May 2013
Bullying happens every day and the number of dramatic effects that it causes increases. Cracking down on the law will decrease all causes and effects with bullying. There have been so many cases with bullying and it increases and gets worse each day. Where I come from if you don't have anything to say don't say nothing at all. We need permanent laws to keep this action to a zero tolerance. Creating laws for this action has become the hardest thing to do. We as a community are entitled to a vote on making this a law. No bullying should be allowed anywhere.
Most people have been bullied once or more in their lives. Being bullied was once innocent and playful that now turned into a destructive action amongst others. "In 2009. 50 percent of students surveyed said they had been victims of bullies using electronic media (Cyber Bullying Crackdown 1)".Children now and days are all about technology and they bully each other over the web all the time. "One in four of the 14- to 24-year olds who responded to the survey said they had experienced digital abuse within the past six months (Cyber Bullying Crackdown 2)".
Bullying has become a rude awakening for a lot of families and friends and some still have yet to realize what bullying is doing to us. "Nearly half of high school students say they have been bullied in ways that seriously upset them, and researchers have found that bullying victims are more likely to try suicide than non-victims (CQ Researcher par.1)".Most kids have a feeling that aren't worth anything because they are always being put down and talked about in negative ways. "Nearly 40 percent of bullied girls and 46 percent of bullied boys in grades 3 through 12 have been bullied a year or longer, yet fewer than half of bullied students have told a parent (CQ Researcher par.14)".
Bullies have habits that start either when they were little or previous actions from other bullies. "Bullying" use to have the smallest and innocent meaning back in the day."As we create hierarchies, we use social or physical power to hurt manipulate, and get what we want (Graff 2013)". Bullies have always had some type of power in the world; at least the weak let them." The shift came after decades of effort, sped along by two events: the arrival of the new social communication technologies which have exposed once-hidden behavior, and Columbine, which was initially (and incorrectly) blamed on bullying (Graff 2013)".
Cyber bullying has become a major hit in society and our technology is growing with it. "Now, an ever-increasing exposure to technology is enabling ever-increasing bullying of this kind - often anonymous, outside the normal barriers of time and location and often as damaging as face-to-face bullying (Nicol 3)". The more technology grows the more bullies find ways to manipulate others. "Cyber bullying is using technology to deliberately and repeatedly cause harm and distress (Nicol 3). Creating laws on not just in person but the technology laws to prevent cyberbullying will help maintain the increase of victims being harassed every day.
There has been an incident that kids drive their victims to do because they have no way to stop it. "In the past five years alone, four teens from mentor High School took their lives after being tormented and teased for extended periods of time (Albin 157)". The slower bully laws are created the more teens and adults are being affected by this horrible action. "Because cyber bullies can target victims through a variety of mediums, at any time, cyber bullying is not only more severe that traditional bullying, but has also proven to frustrate adolescents' emotional, psychological, and sociological development (Albin 159)". We as a community need to outreach to our young and also to our adults who are the victims and who are the criminals of this action. We never know what's going on in their lives to judge so fast but we can help fix whatever is bothering them.
Some states are tired of bullying and have taking a bigger step to deleting bullying. Schools crackdown more for anti-bullying and try to force upon children to not bully. "Louisiana approved Act 861 earlier this year, one of the most-expensive bullying laws in the nation (Brenneman par.3)". The president of Louisiana Schools says that the new bullying laws will create chaos with the school system. Louisiana president says that the procedural may cause a big strain on the money Intel for real programs. ."When a report is received, the school has one business day to open an investigation, and 10 school days to close it. In that time, investigators must interview the reporter, the victim, the alleged bully, and any witnesses, and must obtain any copies or photographs of any audio visual evidence (Brenneman par.6)". The rules of investigating a crime of bullying becomes a long process and most things are being detected when this goes on. Some citizens think that creating laws for bullying is going against their freedom of speech but saving the ones who are getting hurt is more effective for the world.
Taking action of this criminating act is a lot of hard work and processing with the system on what to do. Creating a anti-bullying law will crackdown on things that need to be done with this devastating act. More than 47 states have created such precaution to fix the increased actions taken to hurt innocent human beings. Researching the laws and regulations of bullying has become a big study on how other states do their law break down. "States have been stepping up to the problem, with some 44 laws on the books, including some that allow school officials to take action against off-campus cyber bullying that causes disruption at school (Billiteri 1)." They create little activities to bring kids and/or adults together because they were being victims of being bullied. Most exercises worked and some didn't at all because of freedom of speech. Critics have come to a stand point on free-speech rights that kids have a right to say anything and everything they want. Those victims also need help to so they can be released from this nightmare. Humans think we need to have freedom of speech when there are a lot of people's lives on the line.
Bullying occurs everywhere in every environment but it mostly happens in schools where the kids go every day and see each other all the time. "The 2008 law requires schools to promptly investigate reported bullying, including incidents when students are en route to school or at a bus stop, and to notify parents of victims and perpetrators as well as authorities "where criminal charges may be pursued (Billiteri p.7)". Making the schools be more aware about this destructive action is a bright idea. Being a parent and keeping up with your students is a big helper too. We need all parents and teachers to help break down the cause of bullying. "There's a lack of attention on prevention and good training for personnel to deal with bullying, says Clemson University professor Susan P. Limber (Billiteri p.7)". Nobody focuses on the prevention of bullying but they always focus on what happens after someone has done something drastically to not be victimized. Some states even push schools to regulate bullying but never fund them money to do so. Schools also go about bullying programs like making up their own rules and hopefully going by what the law says.
Funding these bullying programs and laws for schools has become financially scarce and the schools have tried other ways to cope with bullying problems. "Debra Bradley, director of government relations for the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association, says her group supports the legislation's goals but that it will squeeze school districts financially (Billiteri p.7)." The economy has become a big thing for everybody. Trying to solve the littlest to the hardest situations can make or break schools. Schools say these problems break their budgets. When a kid needs help where will the schools be? Why do they feel like they should put a price to everything? Most of these kids just need help as in just to talk to and see how everything is going. A little bit of counseling comes along way.
When there is a bullying situation schools want it to be just amongst the schools, they don't want to get the law enforcers involved. "We already have a well-documented problem with a kind of funnel of schools into prisons," Wolfe told the newspaper. "Mandatory reporting of children to the police is going to increase the flow of the school-to-prison pipeline (Billiteri p.7)." When kids need help they need help. There are kids out there that are being physically, emotionally, and mentally abused from other kids in the classrooms and lunch rooms. I strongly agree on if the situation gets worse or at any level of bullying it should be taking straight to the police because we don't need it to get any worse. I believe that all kids and adults have equal rights and if they are being tormented and teased all the time they should be helped. Telling a child that you will fix it is giving them some kind of hope but if you don't follow thru your own promises then you are just like everybody else that they think don't care about them. "But Walz, the bill's main sponsor, said last spring the state would \create a policy for when schools should call police and that she expected most bullying cases to remain school, not police, issues (Billiteri p.7)." Higher power doesn't want anything to go to the police because they feel like they can handle or they can just forget about it and think everything is ok. We need to care about our younger generation because they are our future and we won't them to live a happy life as long as they can.
Bullying in school is a way to torment kids but technology has become the number one way to kill the spirit of maybe even kill a child over what is stuck on the internet and what was said over the internet. Kids know that once things are on the internet they have no way of being erased and removed because of how fast the internet updates all the time. One student was being picked on out of school and went to school to tell the principal the other student got suspend for two days and the parent wanted to sue the kid because it didn't happen in school. The bully kids parent one the case and so now they are trying to make a law on if cyber bullying is hurting school activities then they are allowed to help solve the issue. "The high court laid out two conditions for when it could be constitutional for school officials to stifle student expression: if the speech created a "substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities " or posed an "invasion of the rights of others (Billiteri p.8)". We should always fix the problems if it is disrupting school and the people around us. Nobody should be ignored for anything that is hurting them. They shouldn't have to feel so alone and distraught all the time. Americans don't care about the well-being of others all they care about is they and how will they prosper in life. Adults need to know that if your kid is not doing well in school then it may be because they are being bullied and don't want to tell anyone because nobody will help them. "In an interview, Willard says, "The bottom-line question I always ask is, 'If you've got kids going after each other off campus online and that's going to lead to violent altercations or [students not feeling] safe to come to school, do you or do you not want the school official to intervene? No one is going to say they don't. . . No one who cares about the welfare of kids (Billiteri p8-9)." Why would any school officials allow anything like bullying go on in their facility? If you really want kids to feel like they are safe, then why make them feel like they can't talk to anybody about anything? Kids need that protection they are only young and vulnerable to every little thing. They will continue to get picked on if nobody takes action. We need all the parents, teachers, and state officials to come together so they can make the community a better place to help kids feel safer in their environment.
Many states have taken that step to adopting laws and creating rules and regulations towards bullying and what you can and can't do. "Bullying laws in 45 states direct school districts to adopt bullying policies, with 41 states providing model policies (Friedlander p.3)." States are trying to crackdown on the bullying laws but things always get in the way to pursue to further fixes with bullying. When a student is being bullied and they tell school officials, new laws say that they have to investigate and all types of processing to figure out the core to the problem. If bullying ever involves any type of assault and threatening the police should always get involved just in case it goes further than expected. "Likewise, if cyber bullying includes threats of violence, pornography, invasion of privacy, or stalking, a state of federal cybercrime investigation should ensue (Friedlander p.3)." Cyber bullying is the hardest problem to trace because of the internet and it makes it so hard to search for things because the way technology is growing today. We don't know what goes on the internet and when we do try to figure out what goes on we get confused because everything changes at least every week.
Cracking down on cyber bullying is one thing that the stats and legislations have more to work on because they don't do enough for kids to feel safe of keep kids from going to drastic measures. It seems like the world really doesn't care and thinks bullying is a small problem but bullying grows every day and it gets worse over the internet. Pressing for the laws to be passed for kids to be safer in school will be what I have to do because it seems like you have to be victimized in order to be anything done. Most times law doesn't do anything until a student, kid or an adult is getting hurt physically. They wait until the last time when the kid has given in and either committed suicide or tried to. Cracking down on the laws of bullying will help the victims feel safe and heard. I want all kids to be equal and not be a victim of bullying.
Worked Cited
Graff, E.J. "Social climate change: how bullying-- "once known as kids will be kids"-came to be seen as a crisis". The American Prospect. 24.2. (2013): p.83. Web.
Billiteri, Thomas, J. "Do anti-harassment laws violate students' rights?" CQ Researcher. 20.43 (2012). Web.
Albin, Kelly A. "Bullies In A Wired World: The Impact Of Cyberspace Victimization On Adolescent Mental Health And The Need For Cyber bullying Legislation In Ohio." Journal of Law & Health 25.1 (2012): 153-188. Academic Search Premier. Web. 14 Apr. 2013.
Nicol, Sarah. Youth Studies Australia. 31.4 (Dec 2012). P3. Web. 01 May 2013.
"CYBER BULLYING Crackdown. (Cover Story)". Current Events. 111.5 (2011). 4-5. Academic Search Premier. Web. 01 May 2013.
Brenneman, Ross. "Paperwork: Another Reason To Stop Bullying." Education Week 32.10(2012): 14. Academic Search Premier. Web. 01May 2013.
Friedlander, William. "Bullying Basics". Trial Mar. 2013: 15-19. Web.
