It's a sad and terrible fact, but there are 16 to 20 suicides in the UK alone each year due to bullying. However, there could be more as many are recorded with an open verdict, meaning the coroner is not sure the person intended to end his or her life.
| Sometimes adults can think that children are not being serious or that it's just children messing about. |
As the majority of bullying takes place in schools, surely the
responsibility lies with those responsible for schools? Even so, many schools still have major problems in preventing bullying.
Emma, who lives in Newcastle, was bullied at school from the age of 11. Now a teenager, she didn't think she got the support she needed from her school.
She said: "There were 12 girls who bullied me. The school didn't help much. They told the girls off, but it persisted outside of school, where it has no boundaries and there was no way of helping.
"They just suggested that I took a couple of months off, which I did."
Liz Carnell, founder of help site Bullying Online, also agrees that schools sometimes do too little to tackle bullies. Although some schools are very good at preventing it, there are others that just don't want to admit there is a problem, even when children are being removed from school because of it.
She said: "Too many schools just fail to stop the problem, perhaps because they are not monitoring to see whether the measures they've introduced are working.
"Others blame the person being bullied and isolate the person in school instead of isolating the bully.
"It is hard to exclude pupils and referral units often have long waiting
lists, so the bullies, who are often disruptive, simply stay at school,
making life a misery."
So what happens when schools fail to realise a problem, or can't tackle the bullying? To whom do the unfortunate victims turn?
There are many organisations and helplines set up to assist people who are bullied, but do they actually work and, more importantly, are young people aware of them?
Emma, after undergoing three years of bullying, had to resort to physical fighting to make the bullies stop.
She regrets having to fight her way out of her problems, and that might not have been the case if she had been aware of organisations set up to help her. She reckons that they could have given her the support she desperately needed.
She said: "I was unaware of any organisations or numbers to help me. I think it might have helped because it would have helped me feel a bit more supported, as not many people know what I've been through."
However, Liz believes that the majority of youngsters are aware of the help available to them.
"Bullying Online has a high public profile," she said. "We get hundreds of e-mails a week, and anyone wanting our help could easily find it on a search engine.
"However, there are other organisations, like NCH and the NSPCC, which also deal with bullying, but young people may not realise this."
Jan, a counselling supervisor at Childline, thinks young people are aware of help available to them and that adults and the police are now taking bullying seriously, although many don't know what to do to help. And in some cases, she says, they might not be aware of how seriously they should be taking what the children say.
She said: "Sometimes adults can think that children are not being serious or that it's just children messing about.
"I think it's really important that children are able to speak freely and able to put their point across. Another thing that I think affects adults and the police is that sometimes as adults, they don't really know what to do to help."
A lot young people seem to take the view that people at the end of phone lines and e-mails can't do anything, but it seems that they do have positive effects and they can solve the bullying quickly.
Jan added: "Our feedback from children shows that we do make a difference. We have a lot of children who contact us and their feedback to us shows that yes, they have found support."
So these organisations seem to work, but, unfortunately for children, some help sites on the internet can give out unhelpful information which, in some cases, make the situation worse.
Liz said: "There are many 'help' websites around offering 'advice'; be very careful of taking advice from any website, no matter how attractive or professional it looks, unless it's a registered charity.
"The advice will be well-meant, but it's no substitute for discussing how you feel with your parents or your doctor, and hitting back at a bully, as one website advised a teenager to do, could cause injury."
Although there seems to be a lot of support out there for victims of
bullying, some schools are struggling to fight it.
Young people are still struggling to find help and, when they do, they could be given the wrong information ? and as long as this continues, there will be innocent lives lost every year.
About the team
This story was produced by Phillip Clark, 16, Sadaf Chezari, 13, and Sarah Chezari, nine. It was published by the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.
