BULLYING IN NEW ZEALAND 🇳🇿

Bullying can be recognised in a number of ways:
It is when one or more people purposely target another person either online or in real life. They might call them names and make fun of them, or more non-verbally, attack and punch them. Online bullying is called cyber-bullying, and is recognised by mean messages, sharing degrading photos of someone else, etc. 

How can you determine whether is it just bullying or teasing? 
1. It happens more than once.
2. There is an unbalance of power (2 against 1 etc.) 
3. It is always on purpose. 

This is useful to understand because...
Bullying can happen anywhere to anyone - in the workplace, in public, particularly in schools etc. Even if it doesn't happen to you, it useful to recognise bullying in order to put a stop to it and help out someone else who is being bullied. In New Zealand bullying is even more common than in some other countries - evident when teen suicide rates were released. New Zealand has the highest teen suicide rate, and in  most cases, they're often driven by bullying, either online or in real life. Furthermore, international studies suggest New Zealand has the second highest bullying rate in the world. So this is evidence that bullying is an important thing to recognise in New Zealand because it happens so much. 

I felt sad watching the videos about bullying because I can imagine what the bully must be going through, fighting their own battles. But at the same time I feel sad for the people who are being bullied because they may feel terrible. I made a connection with the video because I've been bullied before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ3m78oJnaM

The key messages I took from the video include: words hurt more than you may think. Bullying can happen anywhere, it can even happen to adults in the workplace and not just in schools. 

I think that it is important to stop bullying because it can lead to long-term consequences affecting the mental health sector of New Zealand society. Mental health is a huge struggle in New Zealand and it's one that the government is trying to crack down on, especially on teens, where most of the bullying takes place.