What would you do if you witness bullying?

Nowadays it is pretty common to see the headline “bullying” in the news. This is not a new issue in our society. Have you ever seen someone being bullied? If so, how often do you witness it? What action would you take if you witness bullying or any kind of physical or psychological violence? These may be usual questions that any citizen could ask themselves.

If you answered “YES” to any of the questions above, then you have been in the presence of bullying, either you were the bully, victim, or just a witness. This is exactly my case; I was on the witness side. It was a seventh grade during English classes. A student was not paying attention to the class, and he didn’t even have his book and notebook on the desk. Then a classmate started blowing kisses at him. She didn’t stop or wasn’t stopped during the whole class. The teacher just asked her why she was doing that, but she didn’t give a coherent answer. The rest of the class time was pretty much the same, until that a friend of the girl who was blowing kisses, kicked out the belongings of the boy on the floor, while the teacher was not looking at her. So she could not realize of what the girl had done. The boy did not do anything and acted like he had not seen a thing. I took the belongings of the child and gave them to him.

Different opinions can emerge from these situations, everything depending on whom is the person speaking up. The teacher said “nothing like this has happened before; maybe they were just kidding” I commented this specific case to a partner and her opinion was “Maybe the girl thinks this boy is in love with her so because of it she and her friend bothered him”. Having told this I can tell that there is not just one way to see what had happened, those girls might have been influenced by different determinant factors such as: friends, families, self-esteem, personality problems, culture, own background, and so forth.

In my opinion, a possible solution for these kinds of situations at school would be that the teachers in charge started seeing their students as people with names and faces instead of mere numbers. In my own experience I have realized that the students recognize when a teacher is not really interested in them so the pupils start behaving erratically to catch their teachers’ attention. Therefore, bullying or any situation at school could be possibly solved if teachers and students built close bonds.

I strongly believe that if he is being bullied now there are so many chances for him to be traumatized when older. It is not a simple issue, it doesn’t matter why those girls were doing this, but they need to be stopped as soon as possible, otherwise nothing good is going to come out of this. The longer the teacher waits to take this matter into her hands, the worse the trauma in this boy’s life is going to be.