Media Portraying Bullying

When Austin Williams' character, Shane Morasco, on the soap opera, One Life to Live, started receiving mean text messages and comments on his "MyFace," it was CLEAR that producers and writers have chosen to do a bullying storyline. Usually television shows do storylines like bullying, teenage pregnancy, etc. because they want to make people (especially parents) aware of how serious these things are. The storyline has been building up quickly in the last couple of weeks and will lead to Shane trying to commit suicide.

The bully, Jack Manning, played by Andrew Trischitta, has been playing cruel jokes on Shane, calling him names like “Weezy”, getting him in trouble, taking his money, and the worst of all, leaving him without his inhaler when he absolutely needed it. Shane and Jack’s parents have no idea that this is going on. In reality, most parents never do. They’re in sort of that denial that their kids don’t have problems and are ‘good’ kids. Kids like Shane are very good at hiding it. They won’t seek help because they don’t want to be perceived as weak.

As a viewer of One Life to Live, I’ve seen both sides of the bully and the victim. Jack’s father is one of the biggest bullies on the show. Of course as a kid, Jack would look up to him, so it didn’t surprise me that he ended up being a bully as well. Shane is a good kid, who doesn’t come from a prosperous family like Jack does. He is far from a troublemaker. He has asthma and always has his inhaler on him. Having asthma keeps him from doing certain activities. So, Jack looks at Shane as a weak link or an easy target.

I believe the writers have been doing a great job of portraying the bully and the victim in this storyline. We see stories in the news all the time about people being bullied to the point where they commit suicide. It’s a sad truth. However, we never know the whole story. We don’t know anything about the bully and we know very little about the victim. There are so many sides to a story and on a television show like this, every detail is clear. I don’t know what will happen to Jack or Shane. I’m anticipating that Jack will be punished by his parents and Shane will get some psychiatric help.