A group of Metro Detroit high school students says bullying, especially cyberbullying, is a problem in their schools.
From mean-spirited group chats to harmful photos shared via AirDrop and social media, students describe how technology has made bullying more pervasive and harder to escape.
Here are the students who participated in the discussion:
- Chidi Nnaji -- Senior at University High School Academy in Southfield
- Nishka Pudota -- Freshman at Canton High School
- Summer Griffin -- Sophomore at Cass Tech in Detroit
- Saraya Dallah-Steger -- Senior at Cass Tech in Detroit
- Michael Oommmen -- Senior at Utica Academy for International Studies
- Paris Whitman -- Senior at Southfield A&T
You can watch the full interview in the video below:
Q: Is bullying, especially cyberbullying, an issue in schools?
A: “Definitely. Yeah. It is,” the group responded.
Q: What’s going on with group chats and mean girls?
A: “Freshman year, a couple of students took the mean girls trend and made it a bit too much,” said Paris Whitman, a senior at Southfield A&T. “They started to kind of portray mean girls in the sense of the movie, and became bullies of their own. And with that, they started to make group chats with people’s names as the title of it and bullied them through those group chats, laughed at them, took pictures of them in the halls, said a lot of mean things about them. And only these people in these chats would know about them unless it got out. It became really bad for some of these people because they would even be their friends in their faces. They would be really nice to them, but behind their backs, they would be saying these things in these group chats.”
When asked whether she thinks parents and teachers know how often this happens, Whitman said, “I don’t think so, no.”
“I think it’s happening a lot more than anyone’s realizing, even the students themselves,” Whitman said. “And it’s just going unnoticed.”
Q: How does cyberbullying happen? For example, what about AirDrop?
A: “Since we’re always on our phones and technology is so prevalent, it’s so easy to just AirDrop,” said Saraya Dallah-Steger, a senior at Cass Tech in Detroit. “All you have to do is have your AirDrop on, have your phone turned on, and you just get a notification that’s like, this person wants to send you something, and you accept it, and then it’s a picture of something inappropriate or something pertaining to cyberbullying or talking about somebody, or you know, just something like that.”
Q: Do people block others to avoid contact?
“Yeah, because sometimes you don’t want somebody to always be able to contact you,” said Chidi Nnaji, a senior at University High School Academy in Southfield. “A lot of people are very forceful on trying to get stuff and try to talk to you when you don’t want that in your headspace, so it’s just better to just not interact.”
Q: Has something happened at your school related to bullying?
“So there was this kid who used to be bullied a lot just because of how he looked. And it wasn’t that he was like unintelligent,” said Nishka Pudota, a freshman at Canton High School. “He was actually pretty smart. He was doing well. But just like based off of his looks, people used to make fun of him, call him stinky. Like, even to his face, they would make jokes behind his back. He kind of became like a joke throughout the whole school. So one day, a student went into the bathroom. Climbed up the stall, took a photo of him while he was doing his business, and shared it on like every platform they had. Messages, Snapchat, they posted it on their stories. It was horrible, and the worst part is, they got suspended for like a couple of weeks. They came back, and it was like, they didn’t even admit that what they did was wrong.”
When asked if other students felt like what happened was wrong, or if they laughed, the teen said everyone stayed silent about it.
“The thing is, no one spoke up about it,” Pudota said. “Like, everyone stayed silent. No one stood up for him. And he was just isolated this whole time. It was just so bad.”
Q: How does bullying affect you or others at school?
“It’s kind of become like almost everyday that you get almost desensitized, but it still like kind of brings out like a sadness like because you know that whoever’s being picked on or bullied like it’s not that it’s, not their choice and then people are often doing it and it’s harder to tell who’s doing it to them and then they feel like it could be anyone around them and as she was saying it kind of like closes you off from everyone else,” said Michael Oommmen, a senior at Utica Academy for International Studies.
Q: What do you think about social media companies? Should they be held responsible when bullying happens on their platforms?
“Yeah, I do feel like the companies should take a little bit of responsibility because it’s not really a limit on ages and things like that. It, I mean, in some aspect it is, but it’s really easy to get around,” said Summer Griffin, a sophomore at Cass Tech in Detroit.