As a project to earn her Girl Scout Silver Award, Mirzazadeh spent eight hours researching the topic of bullying and interviewing students then conducted about 14 hours of anti-bullying presentations for students at Hughes Middle School, which she had attended up until last school year. She will be entering her freshman year at Poly High School in September. The Signal Tribune is publishing her findings in a three-part commentary— the first of which is below.
It’s no longer a silent, taboo issue. It’s no longer a hush-hush secret. Now we speak of it. Now middle-schoolers across the district have to speak and hear about it. At Charles Evans Hughes Middle School, every class will sit and discuss it during our assembly-day schedule in first period. Every class will listen as the teacher reads yet another article about it. But I set out to make the students relate. Not just to inform— but to make them feel and see its effect. And now I set out to not just make the students relate, but now, our community. It’s no longer a time to hush up about it. It’s time for everyone to know how much it’s affecting people just in our own community. What is it? Bullying.
With every district-given bullying lesson, students will sit and listen to their teachers read statistics about how 3.2 million teens are victims of bullying every year and how about 160,000 students will skip school to avoid a bully. But what is that to a bunch of 11- to 14-year-olds? Let’s just say, having been through middle school recently and countless bullye3ing presentations throughout, we get used to hearing these numbers. And that’s all they become— numbers.
I remember sitting in first-period history class, as our teacher handed out yet another packet with more stories of bullying and gave us time to read it. Let’s be honest— over three quarters of the class didn’t read it. We didn’t care. Our teacher didn’t care. It was just another article about some 16-year-old boy in some state none of us had ever been to or thought of.
But I had been bullied before. I knew what it was like to come home and not want to go to school again. I knew what it was like to never want to see those people again. I knew what it was like to be hurt in a way you didn’t know someone could hurt you. And because I knew all this, I knew these last-minute, thrown-together presentations given to us as a time-killer wasn’t doing the topic justice. This is why, when I was deciding what to do for my Girl Scout Silver Award, I chose to create a presentation that not only informed people what it was like to be bullied, but also put them into the shoes of the victims. To make them understand the gravity their words and actions have on people.
As I went through and showed some examples of the three main types of bullying— one being the infamous Sharkeisha [a viral video that shows a teenage girl pummeling another girl], I did get some giggles from students. All these videos of such violence “blow up” and “break the Internet” because people are laughing at them— including some students as I brought the image on the screen during the presentation. “But would it be as funny if you were actually there watching it all happen?” I asked the classes. They all seemed to have a common answer. Yet in the safety of our rooms, we pull out our phones and search “Sharkeisha” because we’re curious. Or maybe you don’t; you just heard about it from someone who did.
By making all these videos so popular, we’re supporting this kind of personal, physical prosecution and not discouraging the harm it does to others. What is it about someone being beat up that makes us laugh? A couple times I even got a few giggles out of some of the examples of verbal bullying I gave, including “fake” or “ugly.” What is it about lowering someone’s self-esteem that makes us laugh? Is it not real enough? Is seeing it on a giant screen just too impersonal?
