Opinion

Hong Kong must get tough on bullying to stop failing its children

Name: Self-defence classes help fight bullying
Uploaded: 2020-11-08T22:45:19.000Z
Duration: 2 min 2 s
Description: Self-defence classes help fight bullying

Official declarations of ‘zero tolerance’ of bullying ring hollow without policy backup. Hong Kong needs anti-bullying legislation that requires mandatory reporting of such incidents by schools and government institutions

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Bullying has long-lasting psychological consequences on both the bully and the bullied. The Hong Kong government has run programmes to address the problem but more needs to be done. Photo: Shutterstock

Alice Wu

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA.

Published: 6:45am, 9 Nov 2020Updated: 6:49am, 9 Nov 2020

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”.

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Self-defence classes help fight bullying

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.