Safe Schools are Effective Schools

What is Bullying?

Bullying is when someone, or a group of people, upset or create a risk to another person's health and safety - either psychologically or physically - or their property, reputation or social acceptance on more than one occasion.

Types of bullying

There are three broad categories of bullying.

  • Direct physical bullying e.g. hitting, tripping, and pushing or damaging their property.
  • Direct verbal bullying e.g. name calling, insults, homophobic or racist remarks, verbal abuse.
  • Indirect bullying - This form of bullying is harder to recognise and often carried out behind the bullied student’s back. It is designed to harm someone’s social reputation and/or cause humiliation.  Indirect bullying includes:
    • lying and spreading rumours
    • playing nasty jokes to embarrass and humiliate
    • mimicking
    • encouraging others to socially exclude someone
    • damaging someone’s social reputation and social acceptance
    • cyber-bullying, which involves the use of email, text messages or chat rooms to humiliate and distress.

What bullying is not

Many distressing behaviours are not examples of bullying even though they are unpleasant and often require teacher intervention and management. There are three socially unpleasant situations that are often confused with bullying:

Mutual conflict - In mutual conflict situations, there is an argument or disagreement between students but not an imbalance of power. Both parties are upset and usually both want a resolution to the problem. However, unresolved mutual conflict sometimes develops into a bullying situation with one person becoming targeted repeatedly for ‘retaliation’ in a one-sided way.

Social rejection or dislike - Unless the social rejection is directed towards someone specific and involves deliberate and repeated attempts to cause distress, exclude or create dislike by others, it is not bullying.

Single-episode acts of nastiness or meanness, or random acts of aggression or intimidation - Single episodes of nastiness or physical aggression are not the same as bullying. If a student is verbally abused or pushed on one occasion they are not being bullied.

Nastiness or physical aggression that is directed towards many different students is not the same as bullying. However, since the school has a duty of care to provide a student with a safe and supportive school environment, single episodes of nastiness or physical aggression should not be ignored or condoned

Legal Context

Duty of Care

The common law of negligence imposes a duty of care on schools to take reasonable measures to prevent foreseeable risks of injury of students.

Bullying behaviour in schools should be addressed as part of a school's duty of care to provide safe and supportive school environments. See the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development's anti-bullying policy as stated in the Policy & Code of Conduct.

Occupational Health and Safety

Section 23 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (2004), provides that an employer must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that persons other than employees are not exposed to risks to their health or safety arising from the conduct of the undertaking of the employer. 'Other persons' in the workplace includes students. 

The Occupational Health and Safety Act (2004) is available from the Victorian Legislation and Parliamentary Documents (http://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/).

Disability

Part 8.3 of the Disability Standards for Education 2005 (made under the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/Legislation/ActCompilation1.nsf)), provides that a school must specifically develop and implement strategies and programs to prevent harassment or victimisation of students with disabilities.

Harassment includes any action that is reasonably likely, in all circumstances, to humiliate, offend intimidate or distress a student with a disability. These standards also oblige schools to take reasonable steps to inform staff and students about:

  • their legal obligation not to harass or victimise students with disabilities
  • the school's action should such harassment or victimisation occur
  • the complaint mechanisms available to a student with a disability who is harassed or victimised.