Title:
Girl's Suicide in US Brings Fresh Attention to
Bullying
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
An old problem is getting new attention in the
United States: bullying. Recent cases included the
tragic case of a fifteen-year-old girl whose family
moved from Ireland.
Phoebe Prince hanged herself in Massachusetts in
January following months of bullying. Her parents
criticized her school for failing to protect her.
Officials have brought criminal charges against
several teenagers.
Judy Kuczynski is president of an anti-bullying
group called
Bully Police USA. Her daughter Tina was the victim
of severe bullying starting in middle school in the
state of Minnesota.
Judy Kuczynski says her daughter was a very outgoing
child, very involved in all kinds of things, and had
lots of friends. But over a period of time her
grades fell completely. She developed health
problems.
She couldn't sleep. She wasn't eating. She had
terrible stomach pains and started grinding her
teeth at night. And she did not want
to go to school.
Bullying is defined as negative behavior repeated
over time
against the same person. It can involve physical
violence or it can be verbal -- for example, insults
or threats.
Spreading lies about someone or excluding a person
from a group
is known as social or
relational bullying.
And now there is cyberbullying, which uses the
Internet, e-mail or text messages. It has easy
appeal for the bully because it does not involve
face-to-face contact and
it can be done at any time.
The first serious research studies into bullying
were done in Norway in the late nineteen seventies.
The latest government study in the United States was
released
last year. It found that about one-third of students
age twelve to eighteen were bullied at school.
Examples included being made fun of, pushed, spit
on, threatened or excluded from activities.
Some students had their property damaged. About four
percent reported being the victims of cyberbullying.
The study took place in
two thousand seven.
Susan Swearer is a psychologist at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln and co-director of the Bullying
Research Network. She says schools should treat
bullying as a mental health problem to get bullies
and victims the help they need.
She says bullying is connected to depression,
anxiety and anti-social behavior, and bullies are
often victims themselves.
What can be done to prevent bullying? That will be
our subject next week. And that's the VOA Special
English Education Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
