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This is a Canadian ESL blog for Intermediate and Advanced Students who want to learn and improve their English. Each PAGE above contains thousands of free English lessons, tutorials and practice exercises to help you learn and improve your English grammar, reading, listening, pronunciation, speaking, writing and editing. Some of the resources are Canadian. Others are from around the world.

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Friday, February 27, 2015

Bullying: An Increasing Social Disease

Bullying has become a major problem in our classrooms, playgrounds, workplaces, and over the Internet.  But an increasing number of people and organizations have begun to fight back in order to educate as many people as possible about the devastating effect bullying can have.   

 February 27th is anti-bullying day in Canada - better known as Pink Shirt Day - a day set aside to bring awareness to bullying issues and the devastating effects it can have. 

 What is bullying? 

Bullying is a form of repeated,and aggressive behaviour directed at children, teenagers, or adults. The behavior is intended to cause fear, distress, or harm to another person's body, feelings, self-esteem or reputation.  Bullying usually involves an imbalance of power. 

 Bullying can come in a number of different forms 

 Verbal bullying: name calling, sarcasm, teasing, spreading rumours, threatening, making negative references to a person's culture, ethnicity, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, unwanted sexual comments. 

Social bullying: mobbing, scapegoating, excluding others from a group, humiliating others with public gestures or graffiti intended to put others down. 

Physical bulling: hitting, poking, pinching, chasing, shoving, coercing, destroying or stealing belongings, unwanted sexual touching. 

Cyber bullying: using the Internet or text messaging to intimidate, put down, lie, spread rumours or make fun of someone. messaging to intimidate, put-down, spread rumours or make fun of someone. 

 How common is bullying? 

According to the National Education Association, it is estimated that 160, 000 children in the United States miss school every day due to fear of attack or intimidation by other students.  


  • 1 in 7 Students in Grades K-12 is either a  bully or a victim of bullying
  • 56% of students have personally witnessed some type of bullying at school.

  • 15% of all school absenteeism is directly related to fears of being bullied at school.
  • 71% of students report incidents of bullying as a problem at their school.
  • 282,000 students are physically attacked in secondary schools each month.

  In Canada
  • Approximately one in 10 children have bullied others and as many as 25% of children in grades four to six have been bullied. 
  • A 2004 study published in the medical Journal of Pediatrics found that about one in seven Canadian children aged 11 to 16 are victims of bullying. 
  • Studies have found bullying occurs once every seven minutes on the playground and once every 25 minutes in the classroom.
  • In the majority of cases, bullying stops within 10 seconds when peers intervene, or do not support the bullying behaviour.
  • Students are most vulnerable to bullying during transitions from elementary to junior high school, and from junior to senior high school.
There is a correlation between increased supervision and decreased bullying. Bullies stop when adults are around.  

To find out more about bullying: 
  • Words in the News: Cyber Bully
  • "The Daily Mail leads on a mother who has won a landmark legal case against Facebook after being sent death threats by so-called internet ‘trolls’." Full story
    + VOCABULARY + LINKS
    (englishblog.com)

  • Bullying - Mindmap           
  • Bullying (Wikipedia)
    "Bullying is the act of intentionally causing harm to others through verbal harassment, physical assault, or other more subtle methods of coercion such as manipulation..."



Videos 
A  PSA is  a public service announcement, a type of commercial about important social issues. PSAs are meant to educate people and make them aware of the problems these social issues can cause  
How does bullying affect people?   Read my next post

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