Bully (2011)

Starring: Alex Libby, Kelby Johnson, & Ja'Meya Jackson

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars

Today kids are killing themselves and each other at an alarming rate. The one thing all these cases seem to have in common is bullying. There was bullying when I was a kid, but 3 PM meant the end of the trouble. We had the rest of the day, the weekend, and the summer to recover. The advent of social media and cell phones has made the respite obsolete, as now, bullies can torture their victims 24/7. Bully is an award winning documentary that looks at the problems of bullying and shows the effects it has on children's lives. What I like about this film is that it showed a whole group of students from different economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds. What I took away is that anyone who is even slightly different in anyway, could be a target. What I didn't like was the solutions the film offers. Their solution is to tell someone and to stand up for kids you see being bullied, but anyone who has been bullied will tell you that those are not good ideas. Often times telling someone will anger the bully and make it worse, and as for standing up for other kids, often times that makes someone who wasn't previous bullied, a target. I think the answer is two-fold, in that first, parents need to tell their kids, from a very earlier age, that being unique, different, and even weird are admirable qualities in a person. I also believe the schools need to be tougher, because honestly, does anyone really think that giving a bully detention, telling them they're not nice, and that their hurting other kids really does anything? I think bullies need a taste of their own medicine, to feel those powerful emotions for even for just one day. You can talk until you're blue in the face, but you don't really know what something is like until you've experienced it for yourself.