Sarah Miller
Period 3 English
The editorial is about bullying and it’s effect on it’s victims. It’s central claim is that we should outlaw aggressive bullying
(The author is a lawyer)
The way the writer makes his point is by using the example of a multiple suicide case to make his argument. The different case involve bullies harassing a victim continually until they committed suicide. The one he used was the Rebecca Sedwick case, in which the alleged bullies were dropped of charges, because as the article says ‘bullying is not a crime’. The writer specifically defines bullying as ‘the systematic harassment of an individual with the intent to cause substantial emotional distress’ and he uses this case to show that bullying as he defines it can be a criminal act, and that writing off cases such as this as ‘kids will be kids’ or ‘sticks and stones’ is only enabling the bullies.
The writer then poses questions of the opposition, and, concedes the fact that there should be limits, and that kids should not be restrained from joking good-naturedly with each other. He says that it would be impossible to judge a thing such as name - calling, and that children should be brought up learning how to deal with confrontation and adversity. Again, he draws the line at systematic harassment.
I think that the person who wrote the article has some good points. Bullying can really affect a person and at the very least it should be treated more seriously, and the deadlier effects of it probably should be illegal. I think the problems would be that it would get extremely hard to convict, it could get confused with someone who didn’t really mean any harm at all, or someone could make up evidence.
Question: Do you think that bullying should be outlawed?
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