There are four major forms of bullying: verbal, social, physical, and cyber.

• Verbal: saying or writing mean things

  • • Ex: name calling, taunting, inappropriate comments, and threatening

• Social: hurting someone's reputation or relationship.

  • • Ex: leaving someone out on purpose, telling people to not be friends with someone who did nothing wrong, spreading rumors fake or real, and shaming someone in public

• Physical: hurting/damaging someone’s body or possessions

  • • Ex: beating, shoving/pushing, breaking someone’s things, making rude gestures, and inflicting pain.

• Cyber: online discrimination which includes verbal and social bullying.

  • • Ex: writing mean things about people and posting it, typing nasty and mean things about someone to people in their social circle.

Cyber bullying is an issue that is so hard to solve considering how big social media is. Right after an account is reported and halted, bullies can just create another account. This is also why it's so hard to stop cyber bullying. You can take evidence from online posts or message and report it to adults or school figures. Verbal, social and physical bullying is just as bad. Just because one happens more than the other doesn't mean its not as important or crucial. Bullying is bad in all shape or form and is not okay in any circumstance.

Joking and teasing is a way to encourage better behaviors, but when it starts to become a way to point out insecurities and say hurtful things then it is bullying. These words shouldn't be repetitive and is meant to be playful, unlike bullying, where it is used in a negative way to harm people. Small taps and pushing can be teasing, but when it gets aggressive it is no longer just teasing but bullying or initiating a fight to happen.

Joking is usually done through friends or classmates to create a more comfortable atmosphere and environment to start or continue a conversation. Its done in a friendly and honest behaviors to be kind and not harmful to anyone.

Bullying can be done through these same people too, when these friends/classmates overstep their boundaries and start saying things they wouldn't want others to say to them too. Bullying can come from anyone, and it's usually an aggressive behavior to make someone else feel smaller.

Factors of why it happens:

There are many factors to why children, youths, or adults start to bully others. For minors, their root causes of why they start to bully may be:

• Feeling powerless in their own lives

• Need of being in control

• Someone else is also bullying them

• Jealous or frustrated with the one they are bullying

• Lack of understanding or empathy

• Searching for attention

• Having a dysfunctional family

• Cant regulate their emotions

• Getting rewards through their actions

For adults most of the time it is prejudice against someone’s actions, words, race, ethnicity, religion, and morals. These reasons can be inflicted onto children' too, as a root cause of why they may start bullying or being prejudice.

Of course, none of these should be excuses for bullying someone. It's better to seek help than to release negative emotions onto someone else.