A middle-aged school girl walks down the lunch room to her table. Her head is lowered to where she is only looking at her tray. She sits at the closest table to the back. She listens to the voices around the lunch room. She tilts her head upward and see students pointing fingers and giggling toward her way. She lowers her head and cries. She is the new girl in school. She thought this was only the beginning of her peers bullying her. She was right. When someone is the new kid they are shy because they don’t know what others think of them. I was once this middle-aged school girl.

To www.stopbullying.gov, bullying is an aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or power imbalance. Bullying comes in all shapes and sizes. Types of bullying are physical, social, verbal, or even cyber. Physical involves harming others. Verbal involves saying or writing means things. Cyber is when someone harms you over the social media. The main places that bullying occur in the twenty first century is in an environment or even other social media webpages. But majority of bullying occurs in grades 6-12.

During lunch time I was always afraid to stand up and retrieve my tray from the cafeteria ladies because I didn’t want people to know that I was a new student. While the others would go and grab their meals, I stayed behind so I won’t have to be seen by the group of kids who laughed at me. Sitting at the table alone, people notice you even more. I didn’t think so in my state of mind until the same group of kids sat down and looked over at me. I tried to cover my face to pretend that I was someone else because I couldn’t handle being bullied. But when my peers returned with their trays, a girl from my class sat down next to me and told me that I was being bullied. But neither she nor I told an adult.

According to Make Beat Downs Not Beat Downs website page, there are nearly 2.1 million bullies in America but 2.7 people have been bullied before. Statistics on bullying are pretty high considering that not too many people consider paying any attention to it. One out of seven kids grades K-12 is either a bully or a victim of bullying. About 56% of students have witnessed bullying in their schools. However 280,000 kids are attacked physically in secondary schools each month. 90% of kids between grades 4-8 report being victims of bullying. Whenever bullying repeats itself, it will lead to suicide (www.makebeatdownsnotbeatdowns.org)

One school year, police officers came to visit my school to speak on bullying. I sat in the middle, close to the front so I could blend in with the others. A detective asked us questions about being bullied or being a bystander while bullying occurs. I, as well as everyone else in the room, raised my hands to all the questions asked. When I saw the group of kids raise their hands about being bullied, I instantly froze. I was in shock because I would never think that they were bullied because they seem to get along with the majority of the students. The officers showed a short clip with a student’s family member talking about their child’s situation on being bullied in school. While watching the clip, I looked around to see some kids with teary eyes. I started to feel sympathy for the child’s family. Then I thought to myself that I wish my peers would show sympathy for me. Not because I was being bullied, but because none of them decided to stand up for me.

Sometimes, when a student is a victim of bullying, they believe that they have no power. All it takes is for one person to stand up, and then everyone else will. When I was bullied, I believed that I didn’t have any power to stand up to the bully simply because I didn’t feel as though anyone seemed to care. So, why should I? From that point on, the clip of people getting bullied, I decided to tell a trusted adult. I told my mother and she took matters into her own hands, telling the vice principal. After that day, I wasn’t bullied again.