Thirty years ago, we started taking bullying in schools seriously. But has anything changed?

In 1993, the Sydney Morning Herald published a study on school bullying. It estimated 10 per cent of children were subjected to it, victims needed “assertiveness training” and the person in charge of the NSW public school curriculum, Eleanor Davidson, issued a decree to teachers telling them it was “appropriate” for them to intervene if they were witness to it.

“It’s important that teachers watch out for bullying and address it as soon as it begins,” she said.

Bullying has been a focal point for three decades but is difficult to fix.Credit: Janie Barrett

Almost 30 years later, teachers are more attuned to bullying. Public schools now ask students about it annually. Last year a survey of 263,075 NSW public school students reported 27 per cent of primary children and 24 per cent of high school students said they had been bullied in the previous four weeks.

Academic research on bullying was conducted in Scandinavia in the 1970s, but it took more than a decade before that began to filter down to schools. A University of Sydney study in 1994 found NSW teachers had knowledge gaps when it came to schoolyard bullying and were not sufficiently taught how to deal with it in teacher training.

By 1996, the NSW Parents and Citizens Association called for anti-bullying programs to be taught to students. “It needs to be a statewide initiative,” then-president Ros Jackson said.

A year later, the Bob Carr government introduced a new policy. The students were the solution: peer mediation, where child leaders were taught strategies to resolve and avoid conflict between classmates. There were rules– students were not allowed to gossip about what was said in mediation and had to be strictly neutral in discussions with warring sides.

“The types of dispute that could be mediated in schools include gossip and rumours, name-calling, teasing, problems involving relationships between students, bullying, threats, fighting and loss of property,” then NSW education minister John Aquilina said.

By the end of the 1990s, lawyers were raising concerns that victims would sue their school over bullying, news reports said one gay student had already done that, and principals believed they could be liable if they did not act to prevent bullying.

Anti-bullying programs for teachers and in schools proliferated in the subsequent decades.

But despite the ubiquity of the programs worldwide, University of South Australia’s Dr Ken Rigby estimated there had only been about a 5 per cent reduction in bullying in the last 30 years – going from 25 per cent of children saying they had been bullied in the past week to 20 per cent.

Rigby said the limited effect of the programs was because the reasons a bully targeted other students were complex, making it difficult to prevent. He said some studies had shown many children came from homes with authoritarian and abusive parents.

He also said genetic influence was one of the factors that could make a student more likely to bully. Studies of fraternal and identical twins show how identical twins are more similar in bullying behaviour, even when they are reared apart.

“Both environment and genetics may play a part,” he said.

Rigby, who is the author of Interventions in Cases of Bullying in Schools, said empathy training for children was another way to reduce bullying. “Teachers are familiar mainly with punishing the kids who bully – it sometimes works and is necessary,” he said.

“There are a lot of other options teachers are less aware of, such as helping the victims with their social skills and working with groups of students identified as bullies and their victims to restore relationships.”

A Department of Education spokeswoman said they took a zero-tolerance approach when it came to bullying.

“We have policies and procedures in place for preventing and responding to student bullying, including online bullying, to ensure that our schools are safe places for learning,” she said.

Psychologist Evelyn Field, who has written books on the topic and coached numerous children in how to “block” bullies, said the instructions given to bullied students about how to deal with their tormentors had been wrong.

“That advice: ‘Do nothing, walk away, ask the bully to stop,’ is the advice which has been given for years– it’s nonsense,” she said. “We have to teach children how to block a bully. It is about being calm, collected and standing still – you don’t walk away.”

But is asking the subject of bullying to change their behaviour effectively victim blaming? Not according to Field.

“Wake up, life’s not fair. It is about understanding none of us are perfect, we need to know how to deal with all sorts of people,” she said.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said there had been a steady increase in cyberbullying reports to eSafety, particularly since the pandemic, rising from 338 in 2017 to 1828 in 2022.

“While the increase is concerning, it should be noted our schemes operate as a safety net and the number of reports may also indicate greater awareness of eSafety and how we can help,” she said.

Labor’s ban mobile phones in public high schools begins in October, a move which has been welcomed because it reduces cyberbullying.

When it comes to preventive strategies, Queensland University of Technology Professor Marilyn Campbell said some anti-bullying programs varied in quality.

“Most of the anti-bullying programs are not evidence-based,” she said.

She said the effectiveness of programs was often not measured by schools when they were implemented. Evidence-based anti-bullying programs like Friendly Schools – which teaches children about positive self-esteem, empathy, social skills and conflict resolution – were not a silver bullet.

“For programs like Friendly Schools, which has been extensively studied, there is a moderate change in the number of children who become victimised, there doesn’t seem to be much reduction in students who are doing the bullying,” she said.

She said it was perhaps too ambitious to expect schools to be able to solve the problem.

“There’s bullying everywhere in our society,” she said. “No wonder we are having difficulty removing bullying in schools, because it is so deeply entrenched in our society.”

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