By Nurman Lazim
Bully has become an epidemic that is widely spreading in Malaysia. Throughout the year 2014, many bully cases were reported and most of these cases happened among high school students.
On February 10, Â a form one student T. Kavinraj, 12, Â drank a bottle of pesticide after several episodes of being bullied in his school. He was physically abused and even had his short pulled down in front of other students. Luckily T. Kavinraj was brought immediately to the hospital right after the mother learned that he consumed the pesticide (source: The Star).
This act of bully is a spectrum of aggressive and intentional behaviour that resulted in an intimidating imbalance of power towards the bullied. Bullying comes in many forms and anything will be associated as bullying if it leads the person to feel hopeless at the end of it.
Nowadays, bullying is no longer limited to physical attack. It comes in many forms. For example, one of popular bully acts among school students is calling names. They might view this as a harmless act, but actually the one who’s being called feels more hurt because they will keep doing it continuously. Other than that, name calling is a lot more preferable because it will not cause obvious scars on the bullied, so the bullies will never get caught by the teachers.
A study has been conducted in schools in Malaysia and the researchers found that 93.5% of students in high school were bullied indirectly while 68.2% admitted that they were bullied directly and most of bullying acts were done in the classroom and boys were more involved compared to the girls (source: No Bullying).
There are many symptoms to identify whether the person is bullied. First of all, the bullied feels depressed every time they go to the place where the bullying occurred, therefore their performance in studies will drop from time to time. Next, the bullied enters into depression mode where he suffers from great loss of sleep and poor appetite. If the bullied is physically abused, there might be an appearance for bruises or scratches.
If any of our friends suffer from above symptoms, please talk to him or her so their emotion become stable at the time to avoid any unwanted incident.
In conjunction with anti-bully campaign, The Star, a news company created a platform which gives voices to the bullied. R.AGE is the award-winning youth platform of The Star. With R.AGE, the victims of bullying can speak up through the simple act of sharing experience on platform. This platform will collect information and compile live statistic from users so they can let us know what actually happen around us. Visit this page to know more on bullying or to contribute information about bully in your place.
Other that reporting for bullying cases, as human beings, we must prevent bully from happening around us. A Muslim must protect their brethren from any harm. Islam offers protection for five essential things for a Muslim, which are, his religion, intellect, life, property and dignity. An act of bullying can lead to violate two essential items, life and dignity, that are protected by Islam. As a Muslim, we are pretty much obliged to follow Allah orders instead of going against it. In order to follow the command of Allah, we must not violate, instead we must protect the essentials of other Muslims. This way, we can prevent bully from spreading widely among us.***
Photo taken from R.AGE