The Government has recently charged two experts with leading a review into school bullying.

Dr Charlotte Keating, a clinical psychologist with a PhD in neuroscience, and Dr Jo Robinson, who leads the suicide prevention research unit at Orygen, will examine current school procedures and identify best practice approaches, and develop a new national strategy that will reportedly be “grounded in evidence and informed by lived experiences”.

Dr Grace Skrzypiec, a school bullying researcher and senior lecturer at Flinders University, indicated the review was long overdue.

“I think it’s fabulous. We need this desperately,” she told EducationHQ.

“Research in this area has been going on in Australia for over 30 years, and Australia actually led the way when the idea of bullying first became known.”

The scene has deteriorated since, the expert said, with many available interventions based on flimsy evidence at best.

“People rushed into trying out different things when, in fact, they hadn’t done the research to understand the bullying phenomenon, per se, because bullying has a specific definition.

“People talk about bullying, but they don’t actually understand the academic definition that’s used in research, which is that it’s a repeated, deliberate, aggressive act between a perpetrator and a victim, where the perpetrator has more power than the victim, and the victim feels helpless to fight back.

“And unfortunately, there aren’t too many instruments at all that actually measure bullying. That is one of the issues of the research,” Skrzypiec flagged.

We ought to do away with the labels, the expert argued.

“Kids think ‘I’ve been bullied’ because they’re hurt, and that’s what matters … we shouldn’t be using terms like ‘bullying’ and ‘victim’, we should just be focusing on student behaviour, which is not to be mean to each other, because that’s what kids understand bullying to be.”

Our current understanding of bullying masks problematic behaviours and leaves teachers and parents largely bewildered, Skrzypiec said.

“It gets all confused. Kids go home, they tell their parents, ‘I was bullied today’, so the parents try to do something about it, they go to school [and report] ‘my son or daughter was bullied’, the school looks at it [and concludes], ‘oh, it wasn’t really bullying’.”

Often those dealing with bullying cases carry a bias in favour of the child being targeted, which further complicates the situation, the expert noted.

“It’s often the case that the perpetrator is a very popular person, and the person who’s being bullied, you can perhaps identify things that [are] different about this person, they might walk differently, talk differently, dress differently, whatever.

“So sometimes there’s this bias, where the authorities dealing with this kind of sympathise with the bully in the sense that, ‘we can understand why this person is being targeted’.”

Bullying in Australian schools is a “serious problem”, the Australian Human Rights Commission has concluded, with more than 20 per cent of boys and 15 per cent of girls aged 8 to 18 years reporting being bullied at least once a week.

Yet Skrzypiec’s current research has found an alarming instance of ‘peer aggression’ amongst students.

“I’m working on a paper at the moment that shows that about 40 per cent of kids are involved in what we call peer aggression, where they’re mean to each other – and usually people who are victimised also perpetrate, they try to fight back.

“It’s rare to have the individual who doesn’t, and that is the individual that’s going to be harmed by it…”

Bullying interventions really need to take a whole-school focus, Skrzypiec added.

“Once you get to that point where it’s bullying, schools don’t know what to do, parents don’t know what to do and kids carry that label: ‘I was bullied’.

“And it just becomes worse, I think it escalates a situation [that didn’t need to get to that point].”

The Government review is expected to take place over the next six months before recommendations are handed to education ministers.

“Bullying is not just something that happens in schools, but schools are places where we can intervene and provide support for students,” Education Minister Jason Clare said in a statement on Sunday morning.

”All students and staff should be safe at school, and free from bullying and violence.

”That’s why we’re taking action to develop a national standard to address bullying in schools...”

Skrzypiec is keen to highlight that research suggests children who are happy are less likely to engage in bullying behaviours.

“There is some work that was done at one of the local schools [here in South Australia], where there was a counsellor who liked to keep kids busy and involved in the community, raising money for things, giving them a sense of purpose,” she explained.

“He found that bullying was a lot less when the kids felt like they were part of something, like they had a purpose.”