Bullying Issues In School

Last June, I was leading an investigatory news report on bullying issues in my school for our student online news agency, Imaginist. One interviewee, who used to suffer from isolation and verbal violence, depicted a thorough and touching story of her own experience of being bullied in school. We published her story online using a pseudonym for her under her consent, along with other’s stories.

However, her teacher and the dean of student called me in about one hour after the release, asking me to put down the report. According to them, Imaginist news agency caused additional damages to both the interviewee and the used-to-be bullies: due to the great details in the report, including direct quotations and screen shots, previous bullies recognized

He stated that the report was biased because it did not cover the resolution or the opinion of the bullies, while I believed that the nature of her story in the report was to show the influence of bullies. After arguing for more than twenty minutes, I realized that what actually mattered was the opinion of the interviewee: ending the argument in a hurry, I called her at once to apologize for the troubles that the report had caused, and inquired her opinion about putting down the report. The interviewee’s voice trembled in the phone call: it was certain that she managed not to cry over the phone, but she preferred to let our news agency make the decision. This was the first time that our agency’s report disturbed the lives of interviewees; therefore, I raised a small debate within the news agency to make the final decision. The report was deleted, because the majority of the news agency favored to do so. Later, I drafted an apology to the interviewee and to all readers explaining the influence of the report and our unprofessional and biased report, accepting the dean’s critics. As for the report, I abridged the story about her to just three lines—both under her consent and the former bullies’ consent—and used it as a starter for other bullying stories. On the next day, we published the apology along with the report’s new

First, though rewrite a new story takes time, incorporating the abridged story reduced the depth of the report: a report that lacks enough details could not invoke the same feeling towards bullying as a detailed one do. Secondly, even I abridged the story to only three lines, but the words could also harm the people that are described in those lines, especially when they had not fully recover from the previous injuries. Additionally, everyone who had read the article before could detect the unproportioned part in the new version which might invoke their memory of the original report. Looking back now, my actions at that time were selfish. If I met similar situations again—I hope not—the feelings of interviewees would be my primary