Tracy Renkin, journalist

First published in the TasWeekend magazine (The Hobart Mercury)

This Tasmanian mother is desperate to protect her 13-year-old son. Her “knee-high to a grasshopper” little boy is drowning in hurt. This mother can’t remember when she last slept. The daily tirade of meanness dished out to him in the classroom and the playground has bubbled up inside him and he’s about to explode. It’s too much. 

He’s only in Year 8 but his mother pulled him out of his high school earlier this year because she felt they weren’t getting enough support from the school. He’s been punched and kicked and pushed, excluded and verbally assaulted time and time again. One Year 8 boy allegedly used drum kit sticks to bash him in the head. They’ve ripped up his school books and broken his pencils. According to his mother, one boy pushed her son off his chair with such force his head bounced off the floor twice. She says the impact was so intense he was concussed. 

It’s a devastating story. But it’s just one of the many that the Angels Hope charity has heard since it launched in Tasmania in 2011. The charity largely relies on volunteers who work with staff to raise awareness about school bullying - and to advocate a ‘kindness matters’ mantra. Alex Jordan from Angels Hope compares some high schools to The Hunger Games. “It’s alarming just how many violent attacks, threats and harassment happens without consequences in our high schools,” he says. “In some schools, kids know they can do whatever the heck they want. When teachers tell us what’s going on in their classrooms, they are breaking down in tears. Some are leaving their careers because it’s such a major issue. Teachers want to bring in third parties to deal with this because it’s not their skill set to be social workers or playground police officers.”

Reuben Cunningham set up Angels Hope after bullying in the schoolyard and elsewhere took a dramatic toll on his daughter when she was a teenager. She suffered from conversion disorder, where the mental stress of being bullied began to manifest physically and she was hospitalised. His ultimate goal is to make schoolyard bullying a criminal offence. “We need to change the law so principals can stand up at assembly and remind their students that bullying is a criminal offence and if they want to cause any harm to their peers, then they need to be prepared for big consequences.” 

Following the tragic suicide of Queensland schoolyard bullying victim Dolly Everett in January, Premier Will Hodgman vowed to “swiftly” crack down on bullies - and to enact tough new laws making cyber-bullying a criminal offence. Nothing has since been done, with the government instead saying it continues to consult. In the meantime, the response falls back on to teachers and those few groups - such as Angels Hope and A Fairer World - who work with schools to try and address the problem.

And it’s a big problem. According to the most recent data, about one in four Australian students report they have experienced some form of bullying every few weeks or more. The statistics from the Australian Covert Bullying Prevalence Study also indicate that the rate of bullying of Tasmanian Year 7 and Year 8 students is among the worst in the country. That survey suggested that up to 12 kids in every classroom of 30 claimed they were “being bullied”.

The study’s author, bullying expert Professor Donna Cross, says that not only is the data confronting but that our children are now being bullied in more ways than ever before. Cross is well-regarded internationally for developing community-based programs that reduce school-based bullying and aggression among young people. As a result of an “extraordinary demand” for her program, more than 3000 Australian and overseas schools now use her social and emotional wellbeing initiative: the Schools Plus program. 

Prof Cross says bullying is when someone repeatedly and intentionally uses words or actions against someone else or a group of people to cause distress and risk to their wellbeing. People who do it usually have more influence or power over someone else or want to make someone feel less powerful or helpless. Covert bullying can be almost impossible for people outside the interpersonal interaction to identify. Covert bullying can include repeatedly using hand gestures and weird or threatening looks, whispering, excluding in groups or online or turning your back on a person, restricting where a person can sit and who they can talk to. 

Prof Cross says our children are much more likely to be bullied covertly, in a sneaky way that makes it almost impossible for busy teachers and parents to detect. “Children have said it hurts way more to have somebody do something covertly like leave them out of a group or take some of their belongings than it did to physically hit them. It’s harder because covert bullying is not taken anywhere near as seriously yet it contributes more harm,” she says. “Young people say that adults dismiss it. People want the one solution cookie-cutter approach of ‘if we just address bullying, that’ll fix everything’, but actually I’d like to argue if you just address friendliness and the ways people engage with each other you will fix everything.”

Kelly Pettit has been helping young people for two decades. She is the lead clinical psychologist at Hobart’s Headspace, providing early intervention mental health services to young people aged 12 to 25. Pettit says given adolescence is a time of huge transition it can be really challenging because children are forced to negotiate more complicated social interactions. “Maturation is a factor and brain development is a factor,” Petitt says. “They’ve got more stuff to negotiate, it’s more frustrating, it’s harder and that takes practice. It’s incredibly important for children to feel accepted for who they are within a group. That exclusion stuff is a really big thing. It can be quite subtle exclusion but it can really send a strong message to a young person that they are not accepted and are not cool. And if a young person already has a vulnerability to a mental health condition bullying can trigger that and really send them spiralling,” Pettit says. “I am very confident that unkindness and thoughtlessness absolutely contributes to a young person’s mental health. It’s so imperative that we feel accepted, especially in that age group. Kindness becomes incredibly important [during the teenage years] more so than when they were little because their main job is to work out who the hell they are. Unkindness definitely contributes to unhappiness right through to significant mental health issues. We know that social connectivity is of massive importance.”

Jono Nicholas founded one of the nation’s leading digital mental health services, REACHOUT.com It has become the digital entry point to the mental health system for young people and their parents and is now accessed by 1.6 million Australians every year. He says young people are increasingly going to digital first for help in their darkest moments. “If you look at the data this is the safest and most well generation,” Nicholas says. “They are less likely to take drugs, they are less likely to drink alcohol in large amounts – in fact, they are probably a generation of teetotalers compared to their parents, they are less likely to drink and drive than previous generations but what they are is quite anxious.”

“Being picked on once is difficult and upsetting but being persistently targeted over a number of months can really, really destroy you,” Nicholas says. He says an example of this could be when a group of young people all post a group photo on Instagram showing that one person is being left out. “It’s deliberately targeted and is happening again and again,” he says. “We have to be really conscious about persistent, psychological violence. And that is the stuff that is more likely to happen in a school environment. And schools really struggle with it because it’s not visible. I have a lot of sympathy for schools weaving their way through very complex relationships with teenagers to try and peel away what is persistent unkindness that’s designed to harm versus the moving flow of relationships that are just a part of being a teenager.”

Prof Cross says the children that they are really worried about are the ones who have told them that they’ve been bullied one or more times. “We would define that as frequent – something that’s happened every few weeks or more often,” she says. “For those kids who are dealing with a lot of bullying, it causes long-term harm for them: emotionally, physically and academically.” “A lot of kids are engaged in this behaviour of chronic victimisation and a lot of kids are experiencing it. It certainly is challenging for young people.”

Hobart speech pathologist and criminologist Rosie Martin is a passionate advocate of kindness, and says unkind interactions at high school can cause serious mental health issues as an adult. Martin knows all about unkindness in the school setting because 20 years ago she took both her sons out of school for two years. “Both boys had experienced prolonged unhappiness from regular taunting and unkind behaviour from children at school,” Martin says. “Unkindness is deeply wounding. It’s a sword plunging into your heart. Every act of unkindness is an act of violence against another person because it is a violation of their human worth. But kindness is the greatest human salve.” Martin says unkindness at school has a drastic effect on children’s learning. “If children are experiencing unkindness it will absolutely interrupt their learning journey,” she says. “Anxious feelings reduce working memory which is a key cognitive function that supports learning. What that means is that at a brain base level they are unable to gather the learning being presented so in a way these taunted children are just wasting their time being at school.” She says the flow-on effect of those negative experiences is that many students will drop out of school and that decision can then trigger another accumulation of negative experiences like homelessness and long-term mental health issues. “We are all wired for relationship,” Martin says. “We need each other. And if we are not getting enough warm, tender interactions through our relationships then we are actually being wired for mental health challenges. And those kinds of challenges affect everyone. But kindness is an antidote to all of that.”

Nicholas agrees and says kindness should be a key KPI in high schools alongside academic results. “It is very hard for someone to be at their best if they are not feeling safe,” he says. “If we want our kids to flourish, if we want them to get the most out of their academic environment then kindness should be a key KPI. Kindness should be a really important thing in schools. Why is kindness important as a systemic objective? It’s because when you get it right people flourish and they are at their best and they have an amazing life and when you don’t invest in it, you can often find very toxic environments emerge. Kindness is a key element to help kids flourish.”

Prof Cross takes it one step further and says social and emotional learning for high school students should be compulsory and embedded into the national curriculum. “Social and emotional learning is fundamental to children’s learning,” she says. “There has been some recognition but it’s been more lip-service than genuine support. The most effective initiative has been the National Safe Schools Framework but it’s a bit toothless and there are no funds behind it.”

According to Nicholas, it is crucial for young people to have at least five adults in their life that really care about them. “We know that kids who feel they have five adults in their life who really care about them are incredibly resilient,” he says. “You want to ask kids regularly at the school: ‘do you feel that there is a teacher at this school who you could turn to if you were going through a tough time?’ and you want every kid to say ‘yes!’.” Because if something happens and they feel a teacher cares for them, then even if they have a very difficult home life or are having a difficult time with their friends, they have another adult who cares for them and might be the key to getting them through some really difficult and dark times. If you are a kid, and you don’t believe you have five adults in your life you could turn to if you are going through a tough time then what you are doing is living life without a safety net. Inevitably a tough time will happen and if you haven’t got adults to turn to then the likelihood of experiencing extreme distress goes up. I always say after spending all my career in this game is the most important thing we can do for our kids is make sure that they do have adults in their life that care for them. Of those five at least one or two of them will be a parent but it also means that we need adults like coaches and school teachers to also be there for our kids because it makes a massive difference. It helps to give them the confidence to thrive and a safety net to pick them up when they go through tough times and the adolescent knows that there are people who really care about them when they go through those dark periods. So the absence of that can make you feel incredibly lonely and unloved.”

Pettit agrees. “Young people need a really physically present adult in their life,” she says. “There is a culture now that children are becoming independent quicker, being exposed to adult concepts significantly earlier and a trend where a lack of parenting means peer groups are parenting each other,” she says.  Petit says some of this meanness is a product of a much bigger problem in our society. “Young people are not as involved with adults – even when families are together they are not really together because they are all on their separate devices so technology is playing a part,” she says. “Young people are kind of role modelling each other, we have more family breakdowns, and we have more disconnection from the community.”

Prof Cross says you couldn’t dream up a worse time for kids to make the transition from primary to high school. “Transitioning children from primary school to high school right in the middle of adolescence is probably the worst time we could even think about doing that,” she says. “The transition point is a tough one for kids because we muck up their friendship groups. “Kids have really tight social hierarchies, they know exactly where they sit even though we’d like to think that they don’t. They know who’s above them, who’s below them and everyone in between. And when we move them into high school we break up those friendship groups – and it takes a little bit of forming and storming until the people who were at the top of the pile before have reasserted themselves and so it goes on. So everything again is related to the way children get along with each other.”

Nicholas: “We tend to underestimate that a lot of unkindness between kids is actually them experimenting or learning how to do relationships. And a lot of that is happening through those puberty years of 12 to 16. So having a systemic investment in kids being kind to each other during that Year 7 to Year 9 phase is incredibly important.”

Helen Hortle runs A Fairer World, a small not-for-profit organisation which offers a school-based program running in five Tasmanian high schools targeting students transitioning into high school. Hortle says social and emotional learning needs to be explicitly taught in high schools just like numeracy and literacy. She says young people need to learn how to behave and relate to each other and how to resolve and manage conflict. So far 1635 young people have gone through her program called Let’s Get Together. “In our experience, kindness is very important to students and there is a gap between the kindness they would like to see and the amount they do see at school,” she says. “Our program allows them to learn how unkindness feels, to discuss consequences of unkindness and to practise standing up against behaviour that is not kind.”

Hortle’s colleague Dr Sue Stack says kindness is flagged as the biggest issue in every Tasmanian high school they’ve worked in.“A lack of kindness is huge in high schools,” Stack says. Students fill in a survey at the start of the program. “We have a statement that says: ‘people are kind to each other at this school’ and we are seeing a trend that students are consistently rating that statement the lowest score possible.”

Hortle says her program is based on the heart, head, and hands method. “There is an assumption that we don’t need to learn things like kindness at school but we do,” she says. “It’s not something you can lecture kids about  it’s not the sort of thing you can learn by chalk and talk  you have to learn by feeling the consequences.”

The first thing the children do is rotate through small groups of people from diverse backgrounds – the program’s “human library”. These people share their stories of discrimination and exclusion and explain the personal consequences – how it made them feel and how it impacted their self-esteem, mental and physical health. Their stories help to foster kindness. “They hook the kids and make them feel an emotional connection to their stories,” Hortle says. “That’s what gets to the children and builds empathy. You are looking someone in the eyes in a small group and they are telling you how they were affected emotionally and mentally and physically when they were excluded or bullied. It’s powerful.” Students then participate in activities so they know what social exclusion feels like. Then the children learn new skills like conflict resolution and practise those. And finally, they come up with a social project they feel most passionate about that’s all about creating change. They are mentored through the project and work on it for 10 weeks and then present their findings at a school expo. 

At Rose Bay High School one of the projects was painting the exterior stairs rainbow colours to support gay students. Teacher Jaynee Charleston says it was one of the best examples of a teaching resource that has really hooked kids that she has experienced. Her teaching colleague Charlotte Adams says Let’s Get Together helped her students be kinder to each other. “We still get exclusion and name-calling and the argy-bargy of shoving in the hallway but we are certainly seeing a lot less of it,” Adams says. “The program has had a big impact on the students. Our kids are becoming more aware of kindness and what it looks like and feels like. They asking excluded kids to join their groups more often, they are asking “are you okay?” much more than they used to.”

A Fairer World is competing with Angel’s Hope for a State Government grant both groups hope will make our kids kinder to each other in schools. The grant is only worth $50,000.

And that’s not enough, if you ask the mother of the 13-year-old son being bullied. “It is cruel, it’s so cruel. I know bullying is in every school. It’s not something that should be swept under the carpet. We need more help.”