SAN ANTONIO — The number of kids being bullied in schools across the country continues to rise. In today's Healthy SA we dig into why the number just won't stop going up.
Bullying in-person is just one of the problems, but experts say the attacks have stepped up in number, thanks largely to social media, and it has a huge impact on younger people's mental health and their ability to stay physically healthy.
Lorenzo Gomez, the author of "The Bully in Your Pocket" told us, "As the internet has expanded, it has gotten a lot worse. And I hear personally from principals, teachers, administrators that it's becoming more and more of a problem every day."
Gomez says there are two very unsettling results from extreme bullying. "I think there's two ends of the spectrum. One of them is 'I'm the problem, and I need to end my life.' And the other one is 'everyone else is the problem, and I need to hurt them.' And so I feel like it has these really violent extremes," said Gomez.
The National Bullying Center says one out of every five kids report being bullied. Two out of five of those bullied expect it to happen again. And out of all those students bullied, only half of them report the bullying to an adult at school.
That's the same amount for tweens, where one out of two say they're bullied online. But Gomez says kids are not the only ones becoming victims.
He added, "My parents generation are slowly moving more online, and they're becoming more familiar with the tools [such as] YouTube, Googling, Siri. And so they're also going to experience the same thing that young people experience, just in a different version."
On Wednesday night from 6:00 p.m. until 7:30 p.m., the topic of bullying will be discussed at the Texas A&M University San Antonio Best of Both Worlds symposium. The event will feature community leaders, and the mother of David Molak from San Antonio, who took his life when he was just 16-years-old.
You can check out Gomez' book, "The Bully In Your Pocket" on Amazon.