When a video of a schoolgirl being harassed and slapped surfaced two weeks ago, I frowned and moved on. The shock value has apparently worn off; there have been so many videos of abuse that we have become desensitised. Yet, my apathy unsettled me. I realised that I, too, have become part of the problem. Kudos to this newspaper for calling the assault – 40 seconds of which was recorded and uploaded to social media – of a 13-year-old girl by four other teenage girls what it is and not just a bullying incident. The girls were arrested on suspicion of slapping and kicking their schoolmate and putting a container used to burn paper offerings to the dead on her head following verbal scuffles. To simply call it “bullying” would have trivialised the crime. Without a statutory definition, “bullying” sounds like child’s play, the playground and school hallway conflicts that are just part of the process of growing up. No matter how common it is for school-aged children to fight, none of this – getting slapped, being filmed while getting slapped and having the humiliation broadcast – can be accepted as “growing pains”. The assault highlights, once again, our bullying crisis. Ranking first out of 53 countries in the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment study is not an accolade we should be proud of. Almost one in three of this city’s 15-year-olds said they had been bullied at least a few times each month. This is an outrageous number. The picture is even bleaker when one recognises that there are many more who have not come forward. There are other actors here – the aggressors and the bystanders who are, at best, enablers and, more accurately, perpetrators by their lack of intervention. My initial nonchalance makes me guilty of normalising abuse. Mean girls might have existed long before girls were permitted to be educated, but this latest assault should be ringing all the alarms. It is wrong on so many levels. In this social media-dominated world, brazenly assaulting a schoolmate is not apparently enough. These attacks are now intentionally documented and distributed . It is unclear whether performance crime is a reflection of a perverse sense of self-efficacy on the part of the assailants or intended to heighten the victim’s humiliation. Either way, these formerly surreptitious incidents and their enduring trauma are now made spectacles. These incidents have a long-lasting impact on assailants, victims and their audience. Assault and intimidation have no place in any child’s healthy development and neither does bullying, online or off. The government has run programmes to address bullying, but they are not enough. These horrendous incidents often do not come to light and are thus not dealt with unless the victim comes forward or a video of it is made public . We have to give bullying the legal status of a punishable offence, and we need anti-bullying laws that require mandatory reporting of bullying incidents – “minor” or otherwise – by schools to government authorities. Sweeping changes are needed at the policy level to address this crisis. Declaring “zero tolerance” without policy backup is irresponsible. Policies need to go above and beyond initiatives such as “Co-creating a Harmonious School” because we cannot protect our children by sugarcoating their trauma and scars. With cyberbullying, we have a crisis that extends beyond our schools and school-aged children. Cyberbullying is more commonplace and harmful since anonymity encourages bullying behaviour and intensifies cruelty, its invisibility lessening empathy while the victimisation is constant and its impact far-reaching. Moral obligation does not fall only on one party but on all of us. Bad behaviour that causes visible and invisible injuries cannot be trivialised or justified as settling scores or differences. Do not turn away or brush it off. Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA