Bullying remains our national shame
There are statistics New Zealanders are proud of and some that should make us feel ashamed. The problem is that the latter often go under the radar. How many of us know that we have the secondhighest rate of school bullying in the developed world, with only Latvia ahead of us? Our bullying rates are more than double the OECD average.
When those figures emerged in 2017, Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft said they were both unacceptably high and deeply shameful. He was right, but how many heard?
Studies tell us that between 20 and 50 per cent of New Zealand children are bullied at school. The bullied are four times more likely to contemplate suicide as adults than the unbullied. In a sad twist, the bullies themselves are twice as likely. Unsurprisingly, minorities are targeted. LGBT+ and disabled children are up to twice as likely to be bullied, and Ma¯ori students experience ‘‘consistent’’ racism in schools.
But what good do all these statistics do? Stuff’s Sticks and Stones series has shone light this week on different aspects of bullying. We have told the stories. There are generations of readers who probably grew up with a view that bullying is somehow a fact of life, one of the tough rites of passage of childhood.
This is a fiction that permits bullying to continue. Victoria University researcher Dr Vanessa Green has emphasised that bullying is not an innate part of human nature. Rather, it is learned behaviour, often experienced from siblings.
Society can and does progress. Attitudes now considered unacceptable were once commonplace. Human Rights Commissioner and Bullying Prevention Advisory Group member David Rutherford, a perceptive student of societal attitudes, explained that: ‘‘There’s an attitude of, ‘It happened to me as a kid, it’s going to happen [to them]’, and that’s just not true. That’s the attitude we used to take towards industrial health and safety.’’
As we have learned this week, online bullying is a newer, more insidious form that previous generations have not seen. Research says that children are even less likely to report online bullying than real-world bullying.
Is there a correlation between high levels of screen time for New Zealand children and high levels of online bullying? It seems plausible.
What can be done? Our reporting also showed that New Zealand schools vary alarmingly in the seriousness of their approach to bullying.
Parents sometimes contact the police or the Ministry of Education if they feel a school is not doing enough.
Strong political will has clearly been lacking. Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin has a ‘‘vision’’ of requiring all schools to have anti-bullying programmes and annual assessments that include the voices of students, but there is no set date for such a programme, and her idea has not yet been presented to Education Minister Chris Hipkins. While politicians wait, more of our children are bullied.