Stop Bullying



To begin this article I would like to tell the story of a young man named Ryan H. Ryan was a nice, young boy who was very social except that due to his slow development of speech and motor skills, he was in special education until fifth grade. Once he got to fifth grade he was able to go to regular classes, however, he was unhappy that he was struggling to keep up with the rest of his class. Unfortunately that year was also the first year that Ryan started getting bullied the bully was a boy and his friends were verbally harassing Ryan, his father told him to just walk away and ignore them. So for the duration of fifth grade, Ryan went to a therapist. At the end of the year Ryan was seemingly better so the therapist ended treatment. However bullying then happened on and off during his sixth grade year, then during seventh grade the situation got much worse for Ryan with bullying he even go into a fight with the bully and rumors were being spread about him. Over the summer Ryan started talking to a girl that he had a crush on and once he got back to school and went to talk to her in person she told him that he was a loser and that everything she said to him online had been a joke. The bullying still continued, however at this time Ryan was talking to a boy online who gave him an idea of a way to get away from it all and that was suicide. So on October 7, 2003 Ryan Halligan at the age of thirteen killed himself. Ryan’s dad then dedicated himself to visiting schools telling his son’s story. To learn more about Ryan’s story visit his father’s website
Statistics show that two out of three teens are harassed either verbally or physically every year, corresponding with that in general seventy seven percent of students are either abused physically or verbally, and as well as that over half of teens have been bullied online. And unfortunately bullying can have some bad effects on people. According to ABC News “nearly 30 percent of students are either bullies or victims of bullying, and 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because of fear of bullying.” And a British study shows that at least half of suicides committed by young people are in relation to bullying.
It is due to shocking stories and statistics such as these as well as knowing people who have been bullied that I am writing this article to make people more aware of bullying. Unfortunately it seems to me that bullying is an issue that people have only in recent years have decided to act on. And unfortunately I still feel that there is a lot more that we can do but people are choosing not to act on bullying, which is just letting the problem get worse. And I know that there are speakers and foundations that are doing the best that they can to prevent bullying but they cannot do it alone. So I in particular want to speak to the so called “bystanders” though you may not be the cause of the problem you can do more than you think. The thing is that for some people who are being bullied like Ryan was they sometimes feel like there is nobody to talk to about their problem and that can lead to much worse situations such as suicide because when they feel isolated and alone it can feel like the only way out. So I ask of you the “bystanders” to do more than just watch from a distance. I urge you to reach out and try to talk to people who may be in a bad situation because you can give them some new hope that maybe things are not as bad as they seem. You may not realize it but just by doing that reaching out to someone you can help prevent cases like Ryan’s from happening. And that is why I urge you to take action and I know it can be difficult that sometimes it can be difficult to try to help someone being bullied because you may be afraid of being bullied as well but I hope that you can find the courage to help because you never know how much you can help a person until you give it a shot.