Lead author Dr Ben Lohmeyer, from Flinders University’s College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, says his team’s research reveals that bullying and other unwanted social interactions are key contributors to feelings of loneliness in schools.
Further, rather than being caused by a lack of connection, loneliness can often stem from the presence of undesirable peers.
“Unlike older people, young people are often forced to spend extended periods of time around others they don’t get along with,” Lohmeyer says.
“So rather than loneliness being about isolation, in this case it can be about being surrounded by people who make you feel unsafe.”
Having been a youth worker earlier in his career, Lohmeyer has long studied young people and social harm, violence, bullying and loneliness, keen to discover and understand them better and determine ways and means of improving things.
“My youth work career was working in and around the child detention system and education systems within non-government organisations and wanting to see better informed, better researched interventions that hopefully have some better outcomes for young people as well, hence the transition into academia,” the senior lecturer in social policy tells EducationHQ.
Lohmeyer explains that the research project was created as a co-design process with “an amazing group of young people” called the South Australian Youth Forum.
“Since 2023 we’ve been developing together a whole research method to investigate loneliness, and that was about mapping the lonely spaces in young people’s lives, and so literally creating visual maps of them and then having conversations about what the social experiences were in those physical spaces.”
With some seed funding from Flinders University, the academic then worked with the Specialised Assistance School for Youth, which works exclusively with marginalised young people.
“So we had this really interesting contrast between the two groups - and finding the commonalities between them has been a really important, exciting part of the process,” Lohmeyer says.
Statistics in Australia show that from about 2008, young people have been becoming increasingly lonely.
The aim of the research was also to take a young person’s perspective on loneliness, because many of the assumptions that typically sit around loneliness are that it mainly affects older people and retirees.
Dr Ben Lohmeyer, pictured above, says that schools can be emotionally unsafe spaces where social hierarchies and exclusion shape how students feel and belong. “Our findings challenge traditional approaches that frame loneliness and bullying as individual problems,” he says.
“We wanted to take a young person’s perspective and aimed to really get their insights about their unique experiences, and particularly in this instance, because young people are in school and are required to be in school which is unique to being young, so we wanted to explore what that experience was like as well.”
Lohmeyer says that loneliness amongst adults is largely thought about as a result of the absence of a desired relationship, and the yearning for more social connections.
In the study, he and his team found that young people were talking about loneliness resulting from the presence of unwanted connections.
“… so people around them that they didn’t want to be around – and that can be a school bully, it could be a teacher you don’t get along with, it could be, in some instances, a group of friends but sometimes even those friends might be bullies or people that they didn’t really get along with or feel understood by.
“… and so that ‘loneliness in a crowd’ idea: you’re surrounded by people who’ve got social connections but you’re actually really not happy with them and in some ways they’re quite negative.”
Lohmeyer says that schools can be emotionally unsafe spaces where social hierarchies and exclusion shape how students feel and belong.
“Our findings challenge traditional approaches that frame loneliness and bullying as individual problems,” he says.
“Instead, the study positions them within broader patterns of inequality and emotional harm that are embedded in school systems.”
This shift aligns with international developments, including UNESCO’s redefinition of bullying as a systemic issue.
“We believe that loneliness deserves similar attention (to bullying) in education policy and practice,” he says.
“We’d like to see more qualitative research into loneliness and practical interventions, such as creating safe spaces in schools for students to retreat from harmful interactions, an approach already used in the Specialised Assistance School for Youth (SASY).
“Recognising loneliness as a form of social violence opens up new ways to support student wellbeing and challenges us to create emotionally safe and inclusive school environments.”
The researchers conclude that creating safe spaces in schools could help alleviate loneliness.
However, given the relatively small sample size of this trial, they recommend multiple strategies, and say more research is needed to support young people and to combat loneliness and bullying in schools.
“We already know how important welfare-oriented professionals, youth workers, social workers, psychologists are in our school spaces, and I think education systems are generally getting better at incorporating those professions into the schools and giving space to them,” Lohmeyer says.
“… but there’s probably more we can do. We can give more space to those professional relationships with young people and teachers as well.
“Teachers are a really significant adult in lots of young people’s lives, they’re often very overworked and have lots of students and young people to respond to, so giving teachers more space to have genuine relationships with young people would probably also help.”
