Summary Of Bullying By Wendy Goff
In this article, Wendy Goff discusses the effects of cyber bullying in relations to a school's responsibility of care. Goff examines the impact of cyber bullying through an increasingly common situation, it becomes apparent that the strategies for Australian schools in maintaining their duty of care may be unclear and uncommunicated. In Australia the legal frameworks regarding bullying are diverse, this is because of the federal nature of law, this diversity is accentuated from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Goff discusses the ‘Crimes Act 1958 Section 21A’, talks about the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD). She also discusses the Student Codes of Conduct (SCC), the development of state schools in Victoria and how SCC supports the notion that bullying behaviour in schools should be dealt with as a part of a school's duty of care to provide a safe and supportive environment.
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The principal is to assume responsibility for taking an appropriate action towards the bully and the victim.
Schools around the globe need to be provided with clear boundaries to which their duty of care extends and students, teachers and parents need to be provided with clear avenues to protect them outside the school. Australian legislation and departmental policies have failed to keep up with advances in technology and do not effectively deal with the problems surrounding cyber bullying, either within schools or within society more generally. Australian legislation is extremely limited and requires the adaptation of other legal mechanisms such as anti-stalking and harassment laws to tackle cyber bullying. It also appears that current laws and policies have stemmed from face-to-face bullying measures and are not designed to deal with the new forms of bullying that are possible in the 21st
century.
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) has attempted to tackle the notion of cyber bullying through the strategy 'Safe Schools are Effective Schools' (DEECD, 2007). This strategy demands that all Victorian public schools must develop and implement a Student Code of Conduct that incorporates and addresses cyber- bullying and includes anti-bullying and anti-harassment strategies (DEECD 2007). The guidelines for the development of the Student Code of Conduct empowers each school to construct a document that fosters a healthy school culture and incorporates the state wide framework of the Student Discipline Procedures, 1994. The procedure grew out of section 25 of the Education Act 1958 (Vic) and provides detailed procedures that must be followed in disciplining all students within Victorian state schools.
The major issues in Australia are that there are no single national anti-bullying statute and no definitive nationally acceptable legal characterisation of what constitutes bullying. Cyber bullying presents new challenges to schools and to society in general. Cyber bullying is becoming increasingly prevalent amongst young people throughout the world, cyber bullying is different to traditional forms of bullying and there are now few areas of a young person’s life in which cyber bullying cannot penetrate, this type of bullying makes potentially more malicious and damaging to the health and wellbeing of young people and increasingly more difficult for schools to address.
The principal is to assume responsibility for taking an appropriate action towards the bully and the victim.
Schools around the globe need to be provided with clear boundaries to which their duty of care extends and students, teachers and parents need to be provided with clear avenues to protect them outside the school. Australian legislation and departmental policies have failed to keep up with advances in technology and do not effectively deal with the problems surrounding cyber bullying, either within schools or within society more generally. Australian legislation is extremely limited and requires the adaptation of other legal mechanisms such as anti-stalking and harassment laws to tackle cyber bullying. It also appears that current laws and policies have stemmed from face-to-face bullying measures and are not designed to deal with the new forms of bullying that are possible in the 21st
century.
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) has attempted to tackle the notion of cyber bullying through the strategy 'Safe Schools are Effective Schools' (DEECD, 2007). This strategy demands that all Victorian public schools must develop and implement a Student Code of Conduct that incorporates and addresses cyber- bullying and includes anti-bullying and anti-harassment strategies (DEECD 2007). The guidelines for the development of the Student Code of Conduct empowers each school to construct a document that fosters a healthy school culture and incorporates the state wide framework of the Student Discipline Procedures, 1994. The procedure grew out of section 25 of the Education Act 1958 (Vic) and provides detailed procedures that must be followed in disciplining all students within Victorian state schools.
The major issues in Australia are that there are no single national anti-bullying statute and no definitive nationally acceptable legal characterisation of what constitutes bullying. Cyber bullying presents new challenges to schools and to society in general. Cyber bullying is becoming increasingly prevalent amongst young people throughout the world, cyber bullying is different to traditional forms of bullying and there are now few areas of a young person’s life in which cyber bullying cannot penetrate, this type of bullying makes potentially more malicious and damaging to the health and wellbeing of young people and increasingly more difficult for schools to address.