My question is, has bullying become worse since schools introduced anti bullying policies?

or are we more aware of it?

Rather hypocritically the mother of the boy that did the bullying, wants the victim to apologise to her son. Unbelievable

For some reason I've not been able to get to the article.

I had hoped that school responses to bullying had changed over time, that teachers were more willing to confront it. Clearly if the claims made about the leadup to that schoolyard body slam are true the teachers involved over the years have failed in this case.

I know when I was a child that a smaller child assaulting a larger one was not treated as bullying by some. I was tall for my age and seemed to attract a stream of thugs quite a bit shorter then me with a point to prove. On a few occasions following a prolonged series of assaults I found it necessary to remove the profit from the exchange for my assalant. Not an ideal solution but the only one that seemed to be available at the time.

R0bert

thuggish behavior at schools must be dealt with before it becomes ingrained and normal behavior. Bullying is a lack of respect for another person's rights, and if that's not understood properly from an early age, then schooling may as well be given an F for all the good it's done us all.

'My question is, has bullying become worse since schools introduced anti bullying policies?'

Of Course! The first step in any anti-bullying initiative is to convince people they are being bullied.

As it ever was, bullying is part of life. You can not do anything about it as you cant protect kids 24/7. To a large degree, this is something for kids to work out in private, as a group. All part of growing up, and the separation of children from parental authority, learning their own code of ethics, and experiencing and playing with power. It's a good thing.

More emphasis should be put on the parents of bullied children, as they're the ones who have let their children down, by not equipping them with the social skills and resources to mix within the school community.

Bring on the cries of blame the victim!

I fear for any kid whose parents encourage them to be seen as a victim, setting up a life long pattern of victim-hood.

r0bert, that IS the ideal solution. It taught you independence, it taught you assertiveness, it taught you that sometimes you just have to physically defend yourself, it taught you not to let people take the piss. Would you have learned all that if your partent had had a round table discussion with the kid and both your parents, and talked and talked and you were further ostracised as a dobber in the school community?

At a recent management meeting at our local high school, I overheard one of the department heads state, "I don't give any detention, it's too confronting, sitting in the room with those you have detained".

I wonder how confronting she finds dealing with bullying in the school yard, & weather she runs the other way to avoid being confronted.

I have seen some heads over the years, who would rather ignore bullying, pretending it doesn't happen in "their" school, than try to deal with it. Too many of these clowns seem to believe it will go away, if it's ignored.

The author does not say much about rates of bullying but as far as inter-personal violence is concerned there is little question that, in broad terms, it has been declining both very long term and in the past few decades.

Sociologists construct indicies of number of killings per hundred thousand of population - Why killings? They are easier to define and harder to hide - and those have been declining sincer the middle ages. But even back a few decades, any reader of autobiographies will realise that people use to hit one another rather more freely than they do now.

As for sport the situation is complicated by the professionalisation of the various codes, and the growing number of sponsorships. Players who hit one another on field now stand to loose a lot of money, bad behaviour off the field annoys the sponsors.

Yet another complication is that technology has changed so people have different ways of showing their nasty streak, but definitions have broadened. Text messages, for example, can form the basis of an apprehended violence order.

Now schools could clearly do more to reduce incidences of bullying, but the situation is vastly more complicated than the author would have us believe.