jueves, 14 de noviembre de 2013

Some thoughts about bullying


As Chilean, I have notice along my life that we have a teasing culture, the wrong habit to "joke" about others, until very annoying points. I'm not the kind of person that jokes around about people attributes or lack of attributes, but I growed watching it ocurred everywhere: first at school, between friends, between my relatives, in my own home; but I also notice that it happens at very different levels I mean, my brothers teasing each other about silly stuff its very funny to see, miles away from watching a friend suffering because of unscrupulous classmates. 
Maybe american culture has influenced a bit our society and has been a trigger for the expantion of bullying in Chile, but we can not "charge" them the blame for it. At some point in our recent History something has change and there has been increased physical and psichological violence, specially between children and adolescents, where in crowd drive violence to a small group of them or to a single person, with diverse impact on all of them, generally negative impact.
Fortunately, I have not been a bullying target neither a bully, but  I did saw friends been disturbed by other classmates, since kindergarden, and its something hard to see. Friends from high school even had to get medical help (psychiatrical), because of the extended acts of bullying performed by people of my same age, and I believe I never going to understand them, why they did that? did they enjoy hurting people like that? 
Over the time I have saw some of the bullies, at university for example, and they seem have the same attitude that they had in high school : they behave like they didn't did anything wrong. It's shoking.
I hope this popular behavior ends someday, or stop being so popular so kids don't learn to do it, and they do not become adult bullies.