Youth Bullying

• Sukhmahil Dhaliwal, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2013

What’s worse than hearing that your one and only child had died? What’s worse than hearing that your child had committed suicide? What’s worse than hearing that it was due to bullying at school and nothing was done to help your child? This is what some parents have to hear in both Australia and Japan as bullying takes its toll.
Of the 70,000 cases of bullying in Japan, legal affairs bureaus made cases out of a record 3,988 acts of bullying in 2012. The national police agency fully investigated 260 cases of school bullying that year, more than twice the number in 2011, which was the highest in 25 years. The report said 511 students were arrested or taken into custody for bullying in 2012 and 219 in 2011, which highlights that bullying has risen by over 2 times in the last year. If this rate is continuous, than by 2015 there will be 2044 offenders and the count of victims will be immense.
Bullying, otherwise called ijime in Japan, has various distinctive differences from Australian bullying in that it is rooted in psychological cruelty which may or may not be attached to violence. 80% of bullying among youth in schools in Japan qualifies as “collective” violence, meaning entire classrooms against a single victim, and 90% of the cases are considered ongoing, lasting more than a week.
These may just seem numbers but what the youth go through is “unbelievable” as said by the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, whilst on a trip to some of the schools and parents of the victims. For example the parents of a victim of bullying said to a reporter that their son was over many months, taunted, then beaten, then forced to shoplift items for the bullies, and eventually forced to eat dead bees. At this point the victim’s parents started breaking down in tears as they recounted the torture their son went through. That youth sparked a recent national outcry on bullying when he committed suicide at a mere 13 years of age. Teachers at the school were aware of the problem, but had only responded with a verbal warning and nothing else was done to help that child.
After this interview, the news group went on to other victims parents to ask them their story. The parents said that their child had one day gone to class only to find his desk had been transformed into a memorial, with a wreath and a picture of him in the center, incense lit and a condolence and filled with mocking messages from students and shockingly also some of his teachers, including his 57 year old homeroom teacher who was clearly aware of what was going on. “Now that wreath has become a brutal reality and is imbedded deeply in our hearts and I’m sure the bullies would still be laughing today” recounted the parents as they broke down into tears and remorse their dead child.
The news reporters found that in both these cases the teachers did nothing at all to help the youth’s being bullying but in fact in some cases helped the bullies psychologically torture the youth. This is one of the main reasons why nothing is done to help the youth in trouble. In some cases the teachers can’t manage a classroom and as a result use a single student to be the “clown”, or otherwise known as the bullied youth, and this enables them to manage the classroom easily. An example of this is clearly outlined by author Fujiwara Tomoni.