It’s a cold night in Melbourne and former teacher Katie Govic is warning a roomful of primary school parents that what they’re about to see will be confronting. Mothers and fathers are gathered on seats in the library, amid picture books and paper chains folded by small hands. Earlier today, Katie gave different versions of this talk to kids aged five to 11. She asked them if they had their own devices. The vast majority owned an iPad, a smartphone or a PC. She asked if they knew someone who had been bullied or if they had been bullied themselves. Most had. Now their parents are here to learn how to keep their children safe.
There’s a video cued up on a screen at the front of the room, and Katie presses play. Three teenage boys stand in a row. The one in the middle jumps and the two others each sweep a leg under him, throwing the jumper off balance so that instead of landing on his feet, he slips and slams into the ground. Gasps go up in the room. “Jesus,” one parent mutters. The video contains a few different versions of the same “prank”.
“In the last one, the guy gets knocked out completely,” Katie says. “In 2020, when this was doing the rounds, my colleague’s daughter’s friends did this to her. She was in Grade Two. So where did they see it?”
This viral TikTok trend, which became known as the skull-breaker challenge, was linked to reports of concussions, hospitalisations and young people breaking their arms and wrists. Beyond the threat to kids’ physical safety, there’s a fear these trends are a tool for bullies.
“We do worry: is the child that’s getting tripped up in this situation encouraged to be part of something fun, and then doing it because they want to be seen as popular? Is it another way of them being singled out, or made fun of?” asks Janet Grima, the CEO of Bully Zero. “These viral acts that look like they’re fun and funny can have severe consequences. For us, there’s a duty of care as a society. How do we protect the current generation, the future generation?”
The conversation tonight is an attempt to help parents teach their children to be safe, responsible and resilient. Katie, the facilitator, is from Bully Zero, a charity founded in 2013 following the death of Allem Halkic, who died at just 17 years of age. The subsequent police investigation led to a landmark ruling that his suicide had been caused by cyberbullying.
What followed was an era of acknowledging the harms of bullying. Yet a lot of the progress achieved by Bully Zero and similar organisations like Dolly’s Dream, created in honour of bullying victim Dolly Everett, was diminished by the turmoil of lockdowns and homeschooling.
A national study from 2009 found 27 per cent of Australian students in Grades 4 to 9 were being bullied every few weeks. Now, 40 per cent of children experience bullying frequently. The eSafety commissioner reported an 80 per cent increase in reports of cyberbullying in the first half of 2022, compared to the same period in 2021.
“It’s a huge problem,” says Janet. “One day in August [2021], Kids Helpline received the most calls ever relating to online bullying.”
They’re figures, Katie says, that are distressing, but not surprising.
“Verbal bullying is generally the most common. It makes sense because, when we communicate face-to-face, we’re communicating with words.”
But since that period our children spent at home during lockdowns, there has been a sustained increase in online socialising, and with it has come increased online bullying.
The spike in online bullying worries experts because it’s more relentless than face-to-face bullying, and harder to block out. In an article warning that fortifying children against online bullying should be one of our “highest priorities”, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said her office saw “a strong connection between cyberbullying and what is happening in the school community”.
When bullying moves from the schoolyard to the digital realm, it becomes magnified and concentrated. “It is ever-present, looming, always there,” the commissioner wrote.
Schoolyard blues
“I would get teased for my skin colour, my ethnicity. I’d also be verbally abused and physically,” says Melbourne student Jordan. This would be shocking at any age. When it happened to Jordan, he was just eight. Before the bullying began, he was a sunny and fun-loving child. “I loved school,” he tells The Weekly. “I just loved playing downball with my friends at lunch and I liked my teacher because she was just so happy and made my world feel like cotton candy.” Jordan’s mother Anna is a sole parent, so Jordan would go to after-school care until she finished work. The bullying he experienced there changed him from a bright kid who looked forward to school to a nervous and fearful child.
“I would be really sad, and I would not be looking forward to it,” Jordan says. “He [the bully] would sometimes punch me or just say stuff about my darkish skin colour. He would say racist comments, like, ‘Go back to where you came from’. That really hurt my feelings. I didn’t know how to respond.”
Jordan told the after-school care supervisor, but he says it didn’t make a difference. The supervisor just told the bully not to do it again, rather than explaining how hurtful he was being, and why he should stop. Jordan felt like he was on his own. “I was scared because, if I told someone, he’d get really angry and hit me more.”
One day, as Anna prepared breakfast and Jordan got ready for school, it all became too much.
“Suddenly Jordan just broke down, hysterically crying,” recalls Anna. “He was shaking and saying, ‘I don’t want to go to school.’ I was saying, ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’
“He goes, ‘So-and-so hit me, and I don’t want to go.’ He got me to feel his head. There was a lump.”
Anna says she was shocked and distraught. She took the day off work to immediately address the bullying. She called the school and the after-school care program.
“The issue was falling on deaf ears. It was almost like: it’s a thing that kids do. It was almost like they wanted to disregard the issue,” she says.
Anna searched for support online and found Bully Zero. The group came to the school, talked to staff and students and, says Anna, “the incidents lessened and eventually stopped. The presentation set the tone for the school, and for that kid to know that that’s not right.”
Jordan is now 13 and Anna is mindful of the risks he’ll face online. “He does a lot of gaming. I asked him a few questions, like: who are you talking to? It was familiar names that I know,” she says. Anna has faith in Jordan’s judgement. The early intervention from when he was bullied as a child has made him savvy and confident.
Janet says parents need to start educating their kids about online bullying from an early age. Younger children are more likely to be confronted with schoolyard bullies, “but as we move into Year 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, we start to see the shift into cyber,” she says.
The terrible cost of bullying in school
In August 2022, an elite secondary school in Werribee, Victoria, made headlines after 10 students compiled a TikTok clip entitled ‘show someone you h@te’ which featured the online profiles of their ‘most hated’ fellow students. The clip was viewed more than 770,000 times, sparking disciplinary action and media coverage. Those behind the mean-spirited video told Victoria’s Herald Sun newspaper they were “expressing our bottled-up hatred”.
It was just one example of a recent spate of worrying trends that encourage teens to target each other in ‘challenges’ like ‘Guess Who’, which encourages users to ask potentially derogatory questions about an individual, and ‘Smash or Pass’, which rates an individual’s sexual attractiveness.
“We know that certain online challenges can lead to tragic physical harm, but they can also be damaging psychologically when specific children are targeted,” Julie Inman Grant says.
Parents should be alert to what their children are doing on social media, particularly TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Programs that look fun and educational can be more sinister than they appear. Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft can be a breeding ground for anti-social and bullying behaviour, Katie says.
“Especially gaming. They form squads, say for Fortnite, and if someone doesn’t perform as they should, they get singled out. They’re exposed to a lot there. If you think they’re not, you’re kidding yourself.”
She shows a video made by a concerned mother. In it, she’s playing the multiplayer game Roblox. She walks into a room that is filled with rows and rows of avatars having graphic sex. It’s not bullying, but it illustrates how important it is to understand what your kids are up to online.
“A six-year-old saw that,” Katie says. “How do you undo? How do you unsee? You can’t.”
The conversation in the library culminates with a heart-rending speech from Ali Halkic, who founded Bully Zero. He’s there to underscore to the parents how important it is to understand the threats young people can confront online. His only child, Allem, died by suicide following a sustained campaign of cyber abuse in 2009. Allem had just started Year 12 when his friendship with another young man, Shane, soured and Shane began sending Allem threatening and derogatory messages.
“There was no sign whatsoever that this child was in trouble. This is how scary this thing may be. He was that happy that night when he went to bed,” Ali says of the last time he saw his son.
Ali went to bed at 9.30pm. About an hour later he decided it was time for his son to put his devices away and go to sleep.
“I remember hearing him laughing because he was watching some comedy thing. He had this really funny laugh,” Ali recalls. “I was just about to get out of bed. I could see the light underneath his door and I remember quite clearly taking off the doona to come out, and I saw the light turn off.”
Ali returned to his bed unaware anything was amiss. When he woke up, Allem was gone.
“We started ringing his friends and nobody knew where he was. We went down to the kitchen, and we found this note.”
Allem had taken his own life. In the coming days and weeks, Ali would learn that his son had been receiving threatening and derogatory messages from Shane.
Between February 2 and 5, 2009, Allem received more than 300 texts and social media alerts. Many of the alerts were notifications from Allem’s friends responding to the abuse and saying: ‘don’t worry, we’ve got your back’. But the effect was that Allem was unable to disconnect from the harassment.
“The relentless antagonising and bullying got him to that point that he just could not see a way out of this,” says Ali. “The sleep deprivation that kicked in … the only way I could describe it is probably that he was drunk – that’s how sleep deprived he was – so he wasn’t very coherent.”
Allem’s death scarred his community and traumatised his family and friends. But it also led to a landmark ruling in Victoria, which recognised bullying as a crime. And the cyberbullying Allem was targeted with was recognised as a form of stalking – just one of the crimes of which Shane was eventually convicted.
Ali is burdened by what he sees
as his failure to protect his son, but he knows all he can do now is tell his story and try to make
a difference for other young people.
“One day, I just woke up and the shame and the guilt inspired me to make people aware as much as possible,” he says. “What I try to do
is give you guys an opportunity to
not live this nightmare.”
First line of defence for bullying
Bullying is a learned behaviour. Bully Zero works to foster good habits in the schoolyard and to give children the skills to navigate life online. But Katie emphasises that parents need to educate themselves and their children.
‘Digital natives’, who have been surrounded by digital technology their whole lives, are extremely savvy, she says. “They know how to break passwords. They know how to … make you feel like [a certain application or game] is something they need to support their education.”
As things stand, we’re not doing enough. A 2015 Norton study of Australian parents found 74 per cent don’t know what their children are doing online and 41 per cent have never checked their child’s online activities. This needs to change.
“For us, to prevent one death or one suicide as a result of bullying, whether it is face-to-face or cyber, that’s the ultimate goal for our organisation,” says Janet.
Back in the school library, Katie talks parents through some warning signs to look out for if they suspect their child is being bullied.
“Pay attention to any change in behaviour. They may be hiding devices. They may be secretive about who they’re talking to online. They may be worried, anxious or scared. Unexplained headaches or stomach aches – ‘I don’t want to go to school today, I’ve got a tummy ache or an earache’.”
Many children and teens fear that reporting a bully will make the situation worse. In cases of cyberbullying, they worry their devices will be confiscated, and because that’s where party invitations are exchanged, and social groups connect after school, they worry they’ll become isolated and friendless.
The key, both Katie and Ali say, is to make sure your child feels comfortable coming to you if they have experienced bullying, or if they themselves have done something they’re not proud of. To be aware and to be open.
Ali tells the group that if he had been in one of those chairs 13 years ago, things might have been different.
“Our kids are much more aware and more exposed to things than we were at 10 or 12 or 14,” he explains. “But we have a responsibility as parents. The point of control starts with us.”
Names have been changed to protect privacy. If this article causes you distress, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.
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