Bullying In Schools Across Australia

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among people of all ages, but mostly school-age children. Society has been aware of bullying since around 1693, but it was not viewed as a real problem until the 1970s. “While overall incidents of school violence, such as assault and theft, have declined in the last decade, bullying is on the rise.” (qtd in Tyre) The percentage of middle and high school students that have been victimized by bullying went up from 14 percent in 2001 to 32 percent in 2009. (Tyre)

It is a fact that laws are struggling to keep up with the new forms of cyberbullying that are introduced with new technologies. It has only in the past decade that such issues have been addressed. For such a long time the broad spectrum of cyberbullying has been the main difficulty in defining what it is and where it fits in Australia’s criminal framework.

Bullying is a problem that is on the rise in society; however, many individuals have a distorted view of what bullying entails. Usually when someone thinks of bullying, they assume that it is a standard part of a child’s life. This view, on the contrary, is erroneous. Bullying is actually abnormal behavior, many times, leaving victims with a dismantled self identity. Since some people do not understand the consequences of bullying, the actions of the bully often go unnoticed and are perceived as “kids being kids”. The issue of bullying goes deeper than that nevertheless. Despite the erroneous views that many individuals hold towards bullying, it is still a distortion of normal behavior in children.

People are bullied for many reasons, mostly because of their sexual persuasion, racial issues, attitude, weight and even clothing. Sometimes bully can leads to abusing the victim, end up the trauma of bullying hits the newspaper and the terrible scenario has happened. Perhaps a person has harmed their own self or someone else has stepped over the line and hurt them. Bully usually take places in the silence place such as classroom, a street corner or a home so that the victim can’t called for help. Bullies have the ability to create havoc and seem like the innocent party. There are some example of bully cases happen across the globe.

Technology is rapidly advancing at a dizzying rate which has seen many amazing feats but has also introduced and increased the act of Cyberbullying. Cyber bullying can be defined as targeting someone using any form of technology (this includes social media) to tease, stalk or humiliate someone online (Dictionary.com, 2016). Cyberbullying is so detrimental because it encourages the targeting of an individual; It is often done in secret with the bully hiding who they are by creating false profiles or names, or sending anonymous messages. It is difficult to remove as it is shared online so it can be recorded and saved in different places. Cyberbullying has such a negative impact that research shows that there is a correlation between the violent

Schools around the world offer educational opportunities for their students; which offer many opportunities for social cooperations for the youth. These social opportunities likewise offer many opportunities, one being for children to become victims of bullying.

Understanding the notion of bullying is undermined by an individual’s point of view, life experience, and personality. What some people declare as bullying others shake off as a typical behavior of kids. Whether the bias also has a base in gender or age the issue that needs to be dealt with is the damage done to the victim and the mental health needs of the perpetrator. The question regarding bullying is about norms and responses to violations of the norms. How students and adults interpret the actions, reactions, and feelings are tied to the level of open communications that exist. Adults often believe it when the student says ‘I’m fine’ because they want to believe it. Students are quite skillful about saying what they think adults want to hear. This lack of communication at home and school leaves a student who is being bullied isolated and vulnerable.

Most studies on bullying focus on the negative aspects, pointing to the extreme cases such as when the victim commits suicide. However, there is another side of the story (lead-in statements). Bullying can be beneficial, more so for the victim than the perpetrator (thesis). The perpetrator is playing into a predictable pattern of using power to seek social status and psychological control, or perhaps as a result of mental illness as Wente points out. Focusing too much on the reasons why bullies do what they do, researchers, parents, teachers, and children have forgotten to focus on the most important issue: how to turn bullying into a positive (stance). Bullying is not going away; it is something that adults do to each other and it seems to be built into social patterns and modes of communication universally. "The anti-bullying crusade has been around for years. Yet, kids still torment kids as much as ever even more than ever, now that they can do it around the clock in cyberspace," (Wente). Human nature is mean. By viewing bullying from the perspective of self-empowerment, it becomes possible to mitigate the many problems that bullying causes without resorting to useless interventions such as legislation, policies that are overly tough on bullies, or on assumptions about the victims. Bullying can be an opportunity for growth and maturity, for positive psychosocial development, and for self-esteem building (essay map).

Bullying is a growing epidemic in today’s society and has become a pressing social and educational concern. It is often dismissed as typical adolescent behavior but ignoring the problem could be detrimental to the bully, the person being bullied, and even those who stand by witnessing the unkind acts but do nothing about it. Bullying can hinder academic, social, and emotional development and because it manifests in different forms, it is important to recognize the signs and address it with all parities immediately.

Over the past couple of years, the issue of bullying in the educational environment has gained national attention, various laws have been put in place to prevent bullying. The methods of bullying have changed from cyberbullying, verbal bullying, and physical bullying. Bullying has been known to effect a student’s metal, social, and physical capabilities. Some of the consequences of bullying are suicide, depression, and lack of self-esteem.

Bullying is an aggressive conduct involving the use of unnecessary force or psychological pressure to coerce others. The issue of bullying and its negative consequences continue to create very startling headlines in today’s day and age and within the education sector. Thousands of innocent students wake up afraid to attend school due to the kind of violence they are subjected to by fellow peers. Statistics have proposed that bullying is the worst in UK secondary schools than all other countries in Europe. Nearly half of the students in secondary schools in the UK think that bullying is a major dilemma in their schools. Several studies have identified that there are particular groups who remain significantly vulnerable to being bullied in the

Bullying in Australian primary schools has become an epidemic, having a negative effect on children’s learning and development (Lodge, 2014). Therefore, it is crucial that schools and teachers are aware, understand and educated on how bullying can impact children’s learning and development; to be able to effectively implement policies, respond, educate and eliminate bullying in the school environment.

According to research, bullying and the fear associated with it has caused “a third of students who had been seriously bullied…having serious difficulties in concentrating and paying attention in class” . Results collected in Skrzypiec (2008) also suggest that students who were seriously bullied had a lower motivation for academic achievements, “which in turn could result in poorer academic performance”. These findings are alarming and breaches the national policy in which all Australian schools are meant to be a “safe, supportive and respectful teaching and learning communities that promote student wellbeing.” Because of this breach of student rights the anti-bullying policies have been orchestrated in all schools and is essential and elementary for preventing further problems which could escalate in detrimental effect on mental

According to Wolke and Lereya (2015, cited by Pigozi & Bartoli, 2016, p. 177) the issue of bullying has been neglected by health professionals and needs to be considered as a high-risk issue due to its long and short term effects. It is important that school address bullying before it is evident to prevent it from occurring. There are many legislations in place that are relevant to bullying including; Disability Discrimination Act 1992, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) Act 1986, Racial Discrimination Act 1975, Racial Hatred Act 1995 and Sex Discrimination Act 1984. All these legislations state that bullying is not accessed in all areas of life, for example; in school or in the workplace. In Faitmah’s case the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the Racial Hatred Act 1995 are

School bullying and bullying as a whole has become a growing concern. The need for more intervention is more recognized, as incidents of bullying and inappropriate acts towards others occur in places outside of the classroom. This literature takes a closer look at bullying in schools. Olwesus (2013) states “the field of bullying research is to some extent plagued by problems, disagreements, and unresolved issues” (p.752). Whether if anyone will agree on the root of bullying, the fact remains that bullying has to be examined at its very core to remedy the matter before it becomes a bigger concern. There is a dire need for intervention based programs to be set in place to address the fact the act of bullying has lasting effects on the bully and the victim. When intervention programs are put into place to address bullying, the act of bullying decreases due to the gained understanding of the effects.