Counseling Students to Overcome Bullying Fear

Counseling Students to Overcome Bullying Fear
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Introduction
Bullying goes by a number of definitions, but the basic idea relates to the use of aggression, meant to target a person. Characteristically, bullying is a methodically carried out plan to harm or hurt the intended person. Most of the experts will define the practice as the use of coercion and force to intimidate and abuse the target person. For a practice to qualify as a bullying act, it has to show some elements of repetitiveness, imbalance of power between the aggressor and the victims as well as the intent to harm or hurt the person.
It is estimated that more than 32% of the students have experienced bullying at one point or the other in their lives. Most principals however, will stand tall and state that they do not have any form of bullying in their schools, which is not entirely true. The aspects of bullying are so vast that they cannot be illuminated with simple checkboxes on the routine reports. Over the years there have been cases of students fighting back, by bringing weapons to the schools and as the result end up in the news rooms across the states (Helpguide.org, 2014). Recent years have seen a rise in the number of students that come to school with a loaded gun and open fire killing students and bystanders. This aspect of students’ choosing to fight back, is directly related to the fact that students who are under intense fear subjected to them by the bullies, are more likely to bring weapons to school as a form of retaliation or to help them feel safer.
Research suggests that in the schools that show high prevalent cases of bullying, the students perform worse than in the average schools (Linsin, 2011). Counselors have a great role to play in the reduction of the cases of bullying and more so in helping the students that have experienced bullying to recover from their fear and live productive lives (HYPERLINK "/about/contact/copyright/index.aspx" \t "_parent" \o "Copyright"American Psychological Association, 2014). At the same time, bullying has in the past been associated with increased rates of suicide as a factor among many others.
Thesis statement
This paper tries to establish the best approach for counselors to help students who experience fear from bullying recover and become productive.
Variations of Bullying
There are quite a number of outlets that the bullies use to get to their victims, all of which can be classified under either verbal, physical, cyber or social bullying (Linsin, 2011). This is why it is quite a challenge for the school heads to indicate the true figure of the students that are being bullied at their schools. For the school head who feel that they have eradicated the aspects of bullying in school, it is crucial that they understand the various outlets used by bullies to wreck havoc on their victims (Helpguide.org, 2014).
Students are commonly bullied by spreading rumors about t...