Bullying is one of the biggest problems in America and affects millions of people. Bullying is  defined as the repeated, and unwanted harassment that involves a real or perceived imbalance of power between a bully or bullies and another person who is being attacked. Bullying doesn’t only happen in schools; bullying happens everywhere, especially on the Internet in the the form of cyber bullying. Nobody is safe from bullying, and that’s why it needs to stop.

Certain groups of people get bullied more often than others. People in the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, immigrants, members of certain religious groups, and ethnic or racial minorities are more at risk. But people in the LGBTQ community are more susceptible to getting bullied, with nearly 90% experiencing some form of it. That means 9/10 teens in this community will experience some kind of harassment. Those numbers are too high and need to be changed.

Bullying needs to stop for many reasons but one being it is causing the suicide rates in the LGBTQ community to go up. “According to recent gay bullying statistics, gay and lesbian teens are two to three times as more likely to commit teen suicide than other youths” as said in a gay bullying statistics article. This shows that because of bullying teens in the community are at a greater risk of having suicidal thought and even taking it as far as committing suicide. Bullying is what is killing teens in the community and is the reason why some people will not be able to live out their lives fully.

On top of that, bullying lowers self-esteem, which then affects grades and mental health. When people of the community get cyber bullied and bullied at school too that has a big effect on self-esteem and emotions. Statistics show that cyber bullying of LGBT youth is three times higher than what other students experience, and 42% of LGBT youth have experienced it. This leads to many things such as them not believing in themselves, thinking nobody likes them, and that they are not good enough. Which then leads to affecting their mental health or bring up the topic of suicide.

No one should ever have to go through this type of situation and have these feelings of self doubt, and that's where you can help. Save these people from this harassment that they have learned to live with for who knows how long. Save the ones who think the only choice they have is to take their own life because they don’t want to deal with the pain anymore. Please be the one to put an official end to all kinds of bullying, to save all different types of people not just everyone in the LGBTQ community. Just do something to try and put a stop to bullying.

Sincerely,

A future voter who is counting on you

D.D.