fuzionzmagazine.com Jul/Aug 2014 28
Dr. Audrey Newsome addressed some of these issues in a previous interview I had with her. We had an interesting discussion on some of the issues that she see’s on a day to day basis and the reactions of the youth she talks with, who are the victims of bullying. Dr. Newsome says, “The bullying of today has unfortunately gotten so much more vicious than it was when we were growing up and, of course, it’s because of the internet and cyber bullying. This type of bullying has gotten to be one of those things that’s constant. It’s happening over and over, so the kids are not able to get that respect they’ve been used to getting. You could, at one time, leave school and it would be done for the day, at least, and now its 24/7. Bullying is constant with the kids and, unfortunately, it has taken a really, mean-spirited tone, especially with our women. That’s the fastest growing population of bullies and unfortunately, the most vicious. Even though we’re nurturers, we tend to use that nurturing in a negative way. We will get in a group and we will exclude one. That’s bullying when you do it constantly over and over and you do it intentionally. Our young women are the ones who do that the most. Physical bullying is usually done by the young men. Now, we still have some girls that do that, but that’s more of a guy thing. These young women now talk about each other, they put untrue things about these young ladies on the internet; texting, sexting, those kind of things are what has made bullying more vicious and more mean spirited. Some of our young people can’t deal with it because everybody is not equipped to deal with bullying like we used to. You know, parents used to tell you to go back and fight that bully, but you can’t do that anymore because the bullies could be carrying a gun or a knife, any kind of weapon. You don’t know what you’re going to come up against. So we have these young kids who can’t handle that. They’re anxious, they’re going through anxiety attacks, depression and those are the things which lead to suicide. We’re seeing suicide in kids as young as six to eleven years old.”
If you go to Dr. Newsome’s website, they actually have a video where they talk about those kids who have committed suicide. They look just like all of the other kids. There was an eleven-year old African American boy who this happened to. Dr. Newsome had this to say, “We think we [African Americans] don’t commit suicide, but we do. It’s not as much, but we do suicides and I was really taken by the story of this eleven year old kid who decided suicide was the best way out of his pain, because he had been accused of being gay, he had been dumped in a trash can just because these guys didn’t like him. Unfortunately, he took that to heart, he couldn’t deal with it. His mother came home one day and found him hanging in the bathroom. I think people don’t understand how serious bullying really is and I think that has been so much a part of who we are as people in general. It started hundreds of years ago and it has gotten to the point that it has escalated. It’s causing irrefutable damage to our kids and we’ve got to stop it. We have to do something. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary situation because kids don’t realize they have to be alive to see it get better, so that’s why we put heavy emphasis on the phrase “Life gets better with hope.” We want the kids to know there is hope.
Bullying, as we know it today, has set the trend in suicide among our youth. Our schoolyards and computers have become a battlefield and now we find ourselves trying to help our youth through this ordeal. What we once viewed as non-harmful teasing has become a terrorizing plague. What happened over the course of the years? Did this issue go unnoticed for too long or did we just neglect to address the issue?
Stop the Bullying