Bully Stats...What Children, Parents and Teachers Should Know!

If you are like most parents you breathe a sigh of relief once you get the kids off to school.

I raised 5 special needs children that were adopted as a single male parent. I thought that once they were all on their respective buses that they were going to be in the hands of professionals and would be safe.

I knew as special needs kids they were all going to be subjected to a small degree of harassment. The kids who ride the "short bus" always have this problem.

I was prepared for it and made sure my kids were as well and it all passed without major incident.

However, many kids who ride the "long bus" are not so fortunate. They are, in some cases, in more of a dangerous situation than they were before leaving for school.

Here are some School Bullying Statistics from 2009 Surveys:

*Over 75% of our students are subjected to harassment by a bully or Cyber-Bully and experience physical, psychological and/or emotional abuse.

*Over 20% of our kids admit to being a bully or participating in bully-like activities.

*Over one half of bullying & Cyber-Bullying events go unreported to authorities or parents.

*In 2009 surveys showed over 100,000 children carried guns to school as a result of being bullied.

*28% of students who carry weapons in school have witnessed violence in their homes.

*On a daily average 160,000 children miss school because they fear they will be bullied if they attend classes.

*On a monthly average 282,000 students are physically attacked by a bully each month.

*Every seven minutes a child is bullied on a school playground with over 85% of those instances occurring without any intervention.

*46% of males and 26% of females admit to having been involved in physical fights as a result of being bullied.

*Over 85% of our teenagers say that revenge as an aftermath of being bullied is the leading cause for school shootings and homicide.

*The top 5 states in regards to reported incidents of bullying and Cyber-Bullying are California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

*A child commits suicide as a direct result of being bullied once every half hour with 19,000 bullied children attempting to commit suicide over the course of one year.

As you can see from the school bullying statistics listed above it is indeed a serious problem that must be addressed whenever discovered.

Unfortunately, as indicated above, most instances of school bully activity go unreported by the student victims.

This makes it very difficult for teachers or parents to intervene on behalf of the victim and provide the proper counseling needed for the victim as well as the bully.

A relatively new type of bully, the Cyber-Bully, is relevant in schools as well as home and is a growing concern for parents when trying to protect their kids from this form of abuse.

Cyber-Bullying is the harassment of kids through the use of the internet and filters into the schools when kids return to classes.

It is so serious that over one third of our kids who frequent the internet are victims of the Cyber-Bully.