Essays About Bullying: 12 Ideas For Students

Explore these 12 ideas for essays about bullying to find inspiration for your next writing assignment.

Bullying is on the rise in today’s society, and it can create an imbalance of power between the bully and the victim. This problem is complex, making it a good candidate for essay topics.

According to the National Bullying Prevention Center, one out of every five students reports being bullied. Bullying can happen at school, on the school bus, and even via a student’s phone. However, this behavior is not limited to schools. Bullying can happen in the workplace and the general community and affects people of all ages.

The problem of bullying is not easy to solve, but it is an important matter of human rights. Bullying essays will discuss everything from causes of bullying to solutions. If you need to write an essay about bullying, consider some essay topics. For help with your essays. check out our roundup of best essay checkers!

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Essays About Bullying

1. What Contributes to the Rise of CyberBullying

Cyberbullying is a serious problem for today’s parents. Comparitech performed a survey of 1,000 parents to discuss bullying, and 60% of the respondents indicated their children were victims of bullies. One-fifth occurred through social media apps, 7.9% through online video games, 6.8% through other Internet sites, and 11% through text messages. This indicates that bullying behavior shows up through technology regularly.

There are many factors leading to this increase. Increased media use, the isolation and online nature of life during the pandemic, and less parental involvement are just some of these factors. Your essay can explore what contributes to this rise so that parents can understand the risk their children face.

2. Why Cyber Bullying Is Worse than Physical Bullying

Essays About Bullying: Why cyber bullying is worse than physical bullying?
Your essay could establish that cyberbullying has a more intense effect on bullying victims than other types of bullying

Cyberbullying is a type of bullying that is very invasive. Children and teens cannot get away from their bullies when they are victims of bullying through phones and computers. This makes the bullying more intense and dangerous for some students than when they have a face-to-face bully at school that they can leave behind at the end of the day.

To a bystander, in-person bullying seems more dangerous, but the friends and family members of the victim can’t always see the internal emotional struggle caused by cyberbullying. Your essay could establish that cyberbullying has a more intense effect on bullying victims than other types of bullying. Then, use the essay to support your thesis with statistics and relevant facts.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about cyberbullying.

3. Bullying in Schools: Are Bullying Rules Effective?

No school advocates bullying, and most have anti-bullying rules that are supposed to protect students from the effects of bullying. But are these effective? This essay lets you explore what does and does not work to fight bullying in schools.

Suppose you find that some things effectively fight to bully, but other rules are not; you can discuss why. Then, you can give guidance schools can follow to help reduce bullying behaviors.

4. Is Bullying a School Issue or a Parent Issue?

There is much talk about bullying in high school and elementary school classrooms, but is this an issue for schools to address or parents? Is it a combination of both? This thought can give you a good direction for your bullying essay as you expound on whether you think bullying is an issue for parents or schools to address.

As you research this topic, you will likely conclude that it is both. Then, you can delve into how parents and schools can work together to create anti-bullying programs that effectively reduce aggressive behavior and protect victims. With a cooperative approach, communities often see better success as they work to stop bullying.

5. The Impact of Bullying on Student Academic Achievement

Is bullying just a social issue, or does it affect students’ learning ability? According to the American Psychological Association, school bullying is directly linked to lower academic achievement. This means it is both a social issue and an academic issue.

In this essay, you can discuss why bullying affects students academically. You can also look at whether this is a long-term effect or a temporary one. Does the educational impact of bullying stops when the bullying stops, or does it continue through the child’s educational years? These questions have complex answers, making them good topics for your bullying essay.

6. How Cell Phones Make Bullying into a Growing Problem

Essays About Bullying: How cell phones make bullying into a growing problem?
Your essay can explore this trend by drawing a correlation between cell phone use by children and teens and increased bullying statistics

Increased cell phone use among adolescents is why cyberbullying is on the rise. Your essay can explore this trend by drawing a correlation between cell phone use by children and teens and increased bullying statistics.

For example, in 2013, 19% of third graders had their cell phones. In 2017, that increased to 45%, more than double. Interestingly, three-quarters of the third-graders who exhibited bullying behaviors carried cell phones. You can explore this link more in-depth and suggest limiting bullying and unwanted cell phone activities to help protect children. You might be interested in these articles about racism in schools.

7. My Personal Experience as a Bullying Victim

Have you been the victim of a bully? If your essay is personal, you can transform your bullying experience into your essay topic. Make sure that you tie in how your bullying experience helped or hurt you and what you learned from it.

In your essay, don’t be afraid, to be honest. Did your experience as a bullying victim make you stronger or more compassionate? Were there some benefits in addition to the challenges? Dive into these ideas to make a compelling essay.

8. My Personal Experience as a Bully

Everyone makes mistakes, and it may be that you weren’t the bullying victim as a child but the bully. You could create an essay out of this by exploring why you exhibited this aggressive behavior, and you could discuss what made you change.

Be careful with this type of personal essay. You want to be clear that you do not support bullying of any sort but that you were able to learn from your past mistakes. Show how you have grown and improved since your childhood and what you are doing now to help support anti-bullying efforts.

9. What Workplace Bullying Looks Like

Much of the discussion about bullying focuses on young people, but workplace bullying also happens. Your essay could discuss this form of bullying and how it shows up in a group of employees. This type of bullying is often more subtle than the type seen in middle school and high school classrooms, but it can significantly impact the overall feeling of the workplace.

After looking at how workplace bullying appears, you can also discuss how this form of harassment impacts workers and their mental health. You can end the essay by discussing bullying prevention initiatives employers can implement to limit these behaviors, so workers can feel safe when they clock in each day.

10. The Impacts of Bullying

Bullying impacts people in many ways. It can lead to low self-esteem and poor mental health and damage academic performance or workplace effectiveness.

Build an essay around the impacts of bullying. Weave many statistics into the essay that show how hurtful it is in today’s society. Consider the long-term effects and the short-term ones in your essay, and use it to show why the problem of bullying is such a serious one.

11. Is Bullying an Attempt to Increase Low Self-Esteem?

When a child is bullied, you often hear well-meaning teachers or parents tell them that the bully is simply eating because they have low self-esteem, and taunting or name-calling makes them feel better about themselves. Is this true? You could explore this as your essay to determine if it is.

Research has shown that it is less a sense of self-esteem and more a sense of shame that leads to bullying incidents. When a young person does not live up to their standards, they feel shame, and that shame can cause them to lash out at others so that they can share the shame. This negative behavior takes attention away from the parts of them they feel shame about, which can significantly lessen the feeling of shame.

12. Explore the Different Types of Bullying

Bullying is not limited to sending mean text messages or teasing. It can take many forms, and discussing these can make an interesting essay. Explore each, and then discuss their impact on the victim and why the many types make bullying a challenging problem to solve.

Verbal bullying occurs when people call other people names or tease and taunt them. Physical bullying involves hitting, punching, pinching, or pushing the victim. Social or relational bullying is a more covert form that happens behind the back of the victim, including spreading rumors about them or making mean faces at them. Cyberbullying involves bullying using computers, phones, or other electronic devices.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips!

Author

  • Nicole Harms has been writing professionally since 2006. She specializes in education content and real estate writing but enjoys a wide gamut of topics. Her goal is to connect with the reader in an engaging, but informative way. Her work has been featured on USA Today, and she ghostwrites for many high-profile companies. As a former teacher, she is passionate about both research and grammar, giving her clients the quality they demand in today's online marketing world.

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