Don’t dismiss school bullies

We should all talk much more openly about bullying and violence.

Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

SOMETIME last month a Tasmanian teenager had his head stomped on after being wrestled to the concrete ground during a fight at school. Other kids watched on and giggled, while at least one took out their phone and filmed the incident.

The shocking footage was published by the Mercury yesterday after we were given it by a local Labor MP.

Before publishing, we carefully blurred the identities of both the boys in the fight and went to the Government and police. Both confirmed the veracity of the tape.

Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff’s response yesterday? To issue a press release that accused Labor of having “stooped to a new low exploiting students at a government school ... to push a political agenda”.

Seriously. That was his response. And while the Minister does go on to say that bullying is never tolerated and that the Government was working positively with schools to address bullying, nowhere does he go anywhere near expressing shock.

And yet that’s the very emotion every parent who watched that video yesterday felt. That could have been any of our kids. The level of violence on display is jarring, the fact passers-by were giggling pretty confronting – and the truth is that teachers who the Mercury spoke to yesterday told us this instance was far from an isolated case.

As one explained: “There’s stuff like this going on all the time but if you speak out about it you lose your job, that’s the rules. How can a community have a sense of what is really going on [in our schools] if everyone is gagged? It’s really important to report on this as we need to break the stranglehold that the department has on information about what’s going on in our schools.”

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None of this is to suggest that our educators are not working hard to address the prevalence of nastiness and violence in our schools. Nor is it to suggest that bullying and violence is anything new when it comes to teenagers who, with hormones raging, are also still figuring out pecking orders, relationships and the appropriate way to behave and respond. But we should all talk much more openly about bullying and violence.

And one thing we need to be much more concerned about as a community is the growing trend of cyberbullying – an issue Tasmanian Principals Association president Malcolm Elliott says is now a “very significant issue” in schools.

A generation ago, victims used to be able to escape the taunts simply by going home after school rather than running the gauntlet at the local shopping mall. Today, with technology always on and at hand, escape is almost impossible. Cyberbullying is more covert than physical violence, but its victims are left just as wounded (and it must also be acknowledged that victims of physical violence are often left just as emotionally traumatised as they are physically).

The Government has done the right thing in moving this week to criminalise certain serious

cyberbullying and spending $3 million over four years to combat the problem in schools. But is $750,000 in funding each year really enough? That’s $13,000 for each state high school. Considering that about a dozen kids in every class say they are being bullied, the Mercury would suggest it might not be.