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 second of which is below.
As part of my project, I collected stories of the students’ personal bullying experiences and shared them with the classes and groups I had done the presentations for. I told them how one student, whom they probably walked by in the hall every day, wrote “I can hear other children talking about me and pointing at me… my entire life I haven’t show[n] emotions or talk[ed] to anyone. Because I don’t need help or friends. I need no one at all.”
I told them how one student who sat amongst them wrote, “They started to call me ugly, fat, etc. Wherever I went, they followed me and kept on calling me those words. It was like I couldn’t get them out of my head.”
When I read these and stories like these, the once rowdy, loud class was dead-silent. Let’s just say there is no sight as that of a room of 53 sixth-graders sitting perfectly still and silent after I told them how one of them had written, “There is this kid who, every time I see [him], he has to say something, and every time he says something, I want to scream and cry, and it makes me ask myself, ‘Why aren’t you telling anyone anything? Go tell Ms.Koga [Hughes’s counselor], but I don’t want to go to her and get emotional because everyone thinks I’m happy, and I have a perfect life. But I don’t— I am a victim of verbal and cyber bullying. And because of this I have started crying myself to sleep every night.”
Over 353 students in 14 different classes and school groups sat through and took part in what I’d like to say was not my presentation, but ours. For along the way, I took surveys from students to make the next presentation I did better.
One of the most shocking things to me was the fact that in my very school, while only 11 percent said they’d been a cyber bully, 29 percent said they were cyber-bullied. While only 4 percent said they themselves had physically bullied, 21 percent said they had been physically bullied. And probably the most shocking was how 37 percent said they’d verbally bullied someone, yet 70 percent said they have been verbally bullied.
So where are all these missing numbers coming from? Is it the same people bullying multiple people? Or are students too shy to admit, even in an anonymous survey? Or possibly, some bullies don’t realize what they are doing is bullying.
Story after story, with the same basic plot, left me wondering “Why?” One girl explains perfectly. “My friend was bullying me, and she didn’t even know it. I was her verbal punching bag… I thought I could trust her.”
Nowadays, it’s just socially accepted to be rude. And sometimes, we cross that line without knowing it. One time in a group chat, I had messed with and made fun of one of my friends. He had always played along. One day he told me how it hurt him. I would have never known if he hadn’t spoken up. I didn’t even see it in myself as I built and researched for my presentation.
Words are some of the worst weapons someone can possess, yet the easiest to obtain and use. And sometimes naturally, as human beings, we don’t know when to stop.
In one activity, I had the class spilt into two or three teams and come up with a nasty name you could call someone for each letter of the alphabet. Some of the fastest times include a minute and 51 seconds or a minute and 58 seconds. On the other end, other groups took as long as six minutes and 29 seconds or even seven minutes and 20 seconds. It was quite astounding how quickly students could come up with rude or offensive things they could call their friends and peers. One very surprising event was how so many groups decided to put “gay” for the “g” category— especially considering how earlier in the presentation, I had used the word “gross” as an example, when Long Beach is known for its wide diversity and large gay community.
After this, I had the students do the same thing— this time with words you can call someone that are kind. With this, the highest time was merely four minutes and 17 seconds. The lowest time was a minute and 13 seconds. Out of all 34 teams, only one had taken a longer time searching for the kind words.
This proves the students know what is nice to say, yet often we choose not to. It’s so much more common to hear someone being called “loser” or “stupid” than “lovely” or “sweet.” I challenged each student to, next time they feel like calling someone something rude, come up with a word that’s kind, with the same first letter and call them that instead. Inside, you’ll know you meant “Oh my gosh! Stop being so dumb!”
but it turns out it’s easier to come up with nice terms, right? So, say “Oh my gosh! Stop being so darling!” It may sound like a strange concept, but giving a compliment to someone in a society where so many teens have low self-esteem is so much better than bringing them down.
Though words seem to be having more and more of an effect on teens, it seems a lot of it is through social media. It is so much easier to have the confidence to tell someone off when looking into the screen rather than the eyes of the person you’re affecting.
The following is an example.
“I was on Instagram, and I saw this page, and it was about my best friend, and she was being called [names]. She was crying, and everyone in school saw this and started calling her names.”
In the presentation, I included text messages sent to a girl by numerous people including: “um I don’t like you and never did so please just leave me alone” , “The point is so many people don’t enjoy you being around them… sorry but that’s kind of the way it is” , and “I’m just saying I don’t want to hang out with them if you’re gonna be there [because] I honestly think you try to be like [name] and not yourself, which is pretty sad.”
One student raised their hand while I showed the screen shots and asked, “But why did they always respond?”
He was right. To every text sent to the victim, there was a response such as “how apologetic of you” or “okay. great.” The student proposed the idea that the victim should not have fed the fire. I agreed and added they should have kept the messages and told an adult.
There are endless amounts of stories of cyber bullying I collected, including a couple telling of an adult harassing teens online. One girl told how “I remember her taunting me in the morning at school, and I never knew what to do.”
And with the growing popularity of sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Tumblr comes the growing popularity to cyberbullying.
Today, you will probably see verbal and cyberbullying everywhere. One thing that isn’t as talked about is physical bullying. To a lot of us, especially in middle school, it is almost just a thing we see in movies. I was overwhelmed with the number of my peers who said they had been physically bullied. “Someone took my lunch every day, and I was hungry in sixth grade,” one student wrote. Another told how “I always got beat up because I was poor.”
