Dr Victoria Rawlings, an expert on school bullying at the University of Sydney, told EducationHQ that strict definitions of what constitutes bullying are failing to capture a whole range of damaging interactions that play out in schools.

The warning comes as scrutiny mounts on how one Sydney school deals with bullying, following the tragic death of a 12-year-old student who lost her life to suicide last week. 

The student’s mum sent Santa Sabina College an email soon after her daughter’s death, outlining her grief and wanting answers.

“My beautiful girl took her own life last night because of the relentless friendship issues she faced,” the email read.

“I was scared to label it bullying but that’s exactly what it was. I begged the school to intervene with these girls and now she is gone forever…”

The parent went on to say her child “didn't deserve to go to and from school crying almost every day”.

“She didn’t deserve girls to bark in her face or scream out her name and run away, to purposely hit her with their bag and say whoops.”

Rawlings said she had been shaken by the news, and while she was “very against ascribing blame” to schools, her research has shown that bullying policy – as it is used and understood – doesn’t serve our young people or teachers particularly well.

“There are lots of events that can happen in young people’s lives that might not be classified as bullying, but they are [fundamentally destructive] to their health and wellbeing, and what that means is that they sometimes don’t report them.

“They don’t know how to articulate that these things are really, really important and damaging to them, but also teachers don’t have the capacity, sometimes, to take them as seriously as they should be.”

Bullying is defined as aggressive, unkind or mean behaviours that are repeated in an ongoing manner.

They also happen on purpose – there’s clear intent behind them – and involve a power imbalance between perpetrators and victims.

Rawlings said this take is much too specific.

“In my PhD, for example, there was a really significant moment of physical violence that happened to a young woman at a school – she was kicked and physically beaten.

“But it was seen as a one-off event, and because it was a singular event, it wasn’t classed as bullying.

“So that school didn’t treat that incident as bullying, so it didn’t get the institutional attention and the institutional discipline that it might have got if we understood it and thought about it differently,” she explained.

Senior lecturer Dr Deborah Green from the University of South Australia has also flagged concern over the terminology used by schools, and has said the current definition of bullying (according to Bullying No Way) has been found in recent studies to create confusion between researchers, policymakers, educators, students and parents, who all understand bullying differently.

Reference to ‘low-level violence’ in the school bullying space is often not helpful either, Rawlings argued.

“We don’t know what that means.

“Low-level violence could be low for someone, but really, really important and life changing to someone else.

“Or it could be happening 1000 times for one person, and once from someone else, but just from different actors in the school...” she said. 

The Santa Sabina College incident serves as a powerful reminder that schools must devote an incredible amount of attention to ensure their students are faring OK, Rawlings said.

“I think that’s the real challenge in schools.

“Teachers are so overworked, and they have so much on – they would never want something like this to happen. They would be deeply, deeply devastated.”

But schools are too often hamstrung by policy to deal with bullying effectively, she added.

“I think the definition needs to become far more expansive. It’s not matching up with the experiences of young people.

“It means that we actually can’t see other events, other aggressions, that play out in a school environment that are deeply hurtful and sometimes make young people feel like there’s no future for them.”

Green reported that internationally there has been work on revising the definition to be ‘more inclusive of sociological perspectives’, with the Australian Schools Anti-bullying Collective now developing a classification that works in our context.

There is indeed hope for the road ahead as far as school bullying is concerned, Rawlings said.

“Some of the best schools that I work with now are being way more attentive to wellbeing than they ever have been before, because they understand that they have to dedicate more time and resources to making sure that the students in front of them are OK.

“I think that’s a really promising element to the future, yeah.”

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