Editorial: Bullying leads to a lifetime of misery
For kids who find themselves the target of bullying, going to school can turn into a daily ordeal. This is a widespread experience, with about one in four Australian students in Years 4 to 9 being consistently bullied by their peers, statistics from the Kids Institute show.
And according to a British study published last year, the impacts can cast a shadow over victims' lives for decades to come. Being bullied as a child is linked to poorer health, wellbeing and employment outcomes as an adult. Researchers from the University of Glasgow and University College London found bullying victims were more likely to die before their mid-50s.
Being bullied can set victims up for a lifetime of misery.
That study was based off the life outcomes of victims of bullying who are today in their 60s. And as traumatic as their experiences were, at least they had some respite available to them outside of school hours.
Children in the playground today have no such relief. Their bullies can reach them at any hour of the day through social media. Just how much worse will the impact of bullying be for them later in life?
Knowing what we do about the short and long term effects of bullying, schools and parents have a moral imperative to do what they can to stamp it out.
Yet even among educators, old school attitudes to bullying prevail.
A submission to the Federal Government's anti-bullying review by the WA Council of State School Organisations claims that too often, kids who are the victims of bullying are encouraged to make nice with their tormenters.
It's a misguided approach, rooted in victim blaming that serves only to risk re-traumatising targets of bullying while downplaying the seriousness of the bullies' actions.
University of South Australia senior lecturer and bullying researcher Deborah Green said bullying was a different kettle of fish to isolated conflicts between peers.
'We're talking about the abuse and misuse of power,' she said.
'So when you've got that dynamic going on, bringing the two people together is not helpful. They have to co-exist, usually in a classroom, but they don't need to be friends.'
The WACSSO's submission calls for specially-trained teams tasked with responding to bullying to be stationed in every school while the organisation's president Pania Turner wants a national standard definitions framework to take the guesswork out of responding to reports of bullying for educators.
It's a proposal that makes sense. Responses to incidents of bullying should be consistent across schools to give kids the best chance to thrive in the classroom and in the decades to come, regardless of where they went to school.
Bullying isn't 'character-building' and it's not something we should expect victims to 'get over'. Those outdated and unhelpful attitudes have no place in our education system.
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