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Health & Fitness

Standing Up to Cyberbullying

Students share their experiences of bullying

 on College Avenue in Elmwood is a great place to socialize. I met  sophomores Noelle and Mitch to talk about their experiences of bullying and cyberbullying during high school.

Soft spoken with fingernails bitten to the quick, Noelle’s dark hair falls in front of her right eye, obscuring half of her face. “High school was the worst for me. The first two years were ok. I was well liked but then the summer before my junior year it all went wrong. I began dating a guy one of my friends liked. The more time I spent with my boyfriend, the more jealous she became.”

Tossing her hair to one side revealed a kind face. Her hands made large gestures, describing the incident, “In one afternoon, my life went from happy to a nightmare. I was excluded from everything. When I asked my friends why I wasn’t invited, I was ignored. It may have been alright if it had stopped there but it didn’t. The girl who had a crush on my boyfriend started spreading rumors about me. She sent me and everyone I knew really sick emails, text messages, tweets, facebook postings about me. One morning I found a dead goat on my front lawn. It literally happened overnight; everyone hated me. I felt like I wanted to die.” Her eyes flickered with an old pain.

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Mitch backed her up. “High school can feel very inescapable and isolated; especially after establishing these relationships from childhood.”

Laughing, Noelle said, “It was so bad that my mom noticed.”

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“What made her take notice aside from the dead goat on your lawn?” I asked.

“She is my mom. She knows me. We were driving to the store and she just pulled the car over to the side of the road. She looked at me and said, ‘The light from your eyes is gone, you are not happy anymore. Please talk to me.’ I broke down sobbing with relief that someone noticed that I was dying inside. She said, ‘I won’t let you be a suicide,’ and she took me out of school."

I queried, “Didn’t she go to the principal or the school board?”

“Yes, but what you have to understand is that bullying gets into your head. I was expected to come back to school and mingle with the people that had been bullying me. Like, they just miraculously changed their minds about me? Forget all this and be friends again? You can’t. The principal forced their apologies - it didn’t come willingly. It was just not realistic.”

Mitch added, “Think about it, cyberbullying is not confined to just a school or community; it goes around the world.”

According to www.stompuoutbullying.org, a national anti-bullying and cyberbullying website, one out of every four teenagers across America is bullied. Over 160,000 students stay home from school every day because of their fear of being bullied and almost 300,000 students are physically attacked at junior and high schools monthly. Online, 43 percent of kids are cyberbullied.

Noelle, glanced over at a group of young girls studying. “When I got accepted to Cal, I promised myself that I would dedicate my life to teaching people how to deal with bullying. If people know that we experienced it, stood up to it and changed it, so can they. That’s what my mom did for me,” she said. Noelle continued, “My mom got active and familiarized herself with the signs of bullying. She was also willing to explore and try new ways of education, too. Not all families can do that.”

Mitch played with his blonde spiked hair. “That’s where we need to shift focus. Learning to effectively deal with the bullies whether they be face to face, cyberbullies, bullies at workhome or school can be very empowering. Alternative schooling and our parents taught us that we had a choice to not be victims. That meant we had to be strong, skillful and resistant in the face of adversity. We had to keep working at it and it doesn’t come over night. If we taught this to preschool kids they would have a fighting chance to stand up to this stuff in junior high and high school,” he said.

Cyberbullying and bullying are at an all time high. In 2010, UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health implemented a new scholarship endowed in the name of Phoebe Prince. Prince was the Massachusetts teenager whose suicide garnered international headlines.

Imparting youthful wisdom, Noelle and Mitch acknowledged that as much as the world is full of the awful things, it’s also filled with people who care. A little support from someone can go a long way.

Berkeley is abundant with social networking to help parents and teens cope with this issue. For the most comprehensive information, go to http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/worries/bullies.html or http://www.stompoutbullying.org/.

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