The Relation: Hate speech and Bullying
“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. There was a time that this famous aphorism was true, sadly not anymore. According to an online survey administered by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, since the republican Donald Trump has elected as president of the U. S, more than ten-thousand of teachers and other educators responded the election had negatively affected students’ behavior and mood, and more than eight hundreds incidents of “hateful harassment” has occurred (Gettys). This result shows that how hate speech impacts on students under eighteen year old as individuals. They are immature but also changeable, so as they can be imbued easily with
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One can affect another and it can be spread to the other. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of NURTURESHOCK: New Thinking About Children said in a column, “[A]ccording to Dr. Stephen Russell at the University of Arizona, fully 75% of all incidents that we call “bullying” employ hate speech and bias—racial bias, sexual orientation bias, gender bias, body-type bias and religious bias. The truth is, calling it “bullying” gives kids cover. Bullying, bad as the connotation might be, is something kids do. Hate crimes and assault are something grownups do. No anti-bullying program can succeed unless it confronts these underlying prejudices. Only when such intolerances are reduced will bullying go down” (Bronson, P & Merryman, A. 2011). Hate speech effectively works in children’s world. Since the bully will be an adult and may repeat the same blunder, the cycle never ends.
To break the cycle, one of the solution is making laws which against hate speech and taking disciplinary action on mass media. However, due to the difficulties of its classification and the freedom of speech issue, it can hardly settle the problem. Furthermore, the other suggestion is having an anti-bullying program and a zero-tolerance