Emma: Bullying is when someone is annoying you and for the first few days you think they are just annoying you and it will brush off really easily, but then it just expands, gets bigger, until some people feel like they don’t want to go to school any more, and they feel really stressed and annoyed.
Mairi: I think people just don’t really care and they do it to get a kick out of it. Sometimes it gets really, really serious and it can actually start affecting people’s health. It stresses them out so much they start crying.
Shelby: If it’s in school, they stay off school and they may want to change school, in case it keeps going on and on.
Emma: Bullying is verbal abuse and physical abuse. Verbal abuse is name calling, just annoying them by speech; physical abuse is when they start punching you and kicking you and annoying you with physical activities. Often, it’s someone who has been bullied themselves and they think: “I have been bullied once, so how do you think it would feel to be the bully?”, and they start.
Shelby: I think they pick people on their own, people who walk about by themselves, people who don’t have a lot of friends.
Emma: If the teacher is told and they say to him “stop it”, or something like that, they might not listen to the teacher and they might just continue to do it. But if it is someone very, very serious, and they tell him to stop it, that might work.
Mairi: It is quite hard for teachers, because they are not entirely sure what to do, they are not entirely sure what kind of way to deal with it, cos there are so many different ways, they just don’t know what kind of way to fix it. If you are bullied outside school, there is nothing really anybody can do about it. The teachers can’t do anything because they aren’t there.
Shelby: If you get bullied outside and you go home and you tell your mum and they go “well, hit back”, that’s just like you going and hitting somebody and being as bad as the other one.
Mairi: If it gets really, really serious and really out of hand, there is ChildLine. You can call that if you feel insecure and unsafe.
Shelby: Where I live, some people get bullied, but some people say if you try and bully me, then you will not go that far.
Mairi: It’s if you are not in the in-crowd, then you are nobody.
Emma: How you get into the in-crowd, that’s the thing. A lot of the time, it’s the cool kids who are the bullies. They think they are cool because they are doing it, but really, they are the bottom of it.
Mairi: I think they would know how much it hurt, but I don’t think they would consider it would probably hurt as much as it would.
