Yesterday I posted about a 13-year-old who had been assaulted by a group of peers for 5 hours in a school bathroom. I asked parents to listen to the story, and watch the clip posted by the media which you can find HERE.

Since then, the Courier Mail has released another parent’s account of a primary boy’s experience. It is HERE.

In reality, there are thousands of families who could come forward right now. I carry sadness for every kid and family affected by bullying and assault. In equal measure right now, I am so glad this is being exposed because silence has never protected anyone.

I want to name three things that have been disturbing me for some time, especially during the writing of my upcoming book.

The magnitude of this has been swept under the carpet

Our kids and teens live in a world where bullying and assault are present and normalised.

Australia ranks second highest for school bullying among 24 OECD nations. Roughly 27% of Australian students in Years 4 – 9 experiences bullying every few weeks or more. It impacts their learning, with students’ regularly exposed to bullying scoring an entire year of learning lower than peers. We have to address this.

It is my opinion that the homeschooling numbers tell their own story about how safe kids feel at school. There are now around 45,000 registered homeschooled children in Australia — up 92% since 2020 — with bullying consistently cited as one of the leading reasons families make that call. Queensland alone has seen homeschooling registrations grow by over 160% in five years. These are not fringe numbers. These are families voting with their feet.

Our education spaces are not always safe, and we should speak up  

When it comes to bathrooms, I am appalled at the lack of supervision. Many tweens and teens I speak to go to the bathrooms (both in teaching time and break times) to both hide from trouble and get into it. Primary schools tend to have tighter restrictions with buddy systems in place, and teachers monitoring of bathroom areas, but that is all lost in high school.

While kids deserve privacy, privacy without adequate protection isn’t safety. If we think back to the incident of the 13 year old who was assaulted. A 5-hour assault in any bathroom is only possible when outside monitoring has completely failed. Staff doing regular walk-pasts of bathroom areas, CCTV cameras in corridors, entrances and exits leading to bathrooms around these spaces matters, and so do the skills our kids carry into those spaces.

Arguably the most damning part of the whole incident is not just that it happened, but that five hours passed in a functioning school, and nobody came. Not one student saw or knew what was happening? That’s the haunting question, isn’t it. A few possibilities:

  • They knew and said nothing
  • Fear of becoming the next target
  • A culture of “don’t get involved”
  • Not knowing who to tell or how
  • Not believing it was serious enough to report
  • Loyalty to the perpetrators

Our relationship education programs are struggling

In many schools, relationship education programs aren’t hitting the mark with this generation. Maybe we have overdone it. Maybe they need to be reshaped. Maybe kids are saturated with information. I think it’s the later. Lecture style formats only go so far. We need a shake-up.  

We have spent years defining what bullying looks like and condemning it. Bullies, bullying and all things “unacceptable behaviour” get a lot of air-time. But here’s the gap as I see it. We need to spend more time teaching our kids what acceptable is, and how to assert themselves and stand up for others. This generation are missing genuine assertive skills and haven’t had the opportunity to practise them in the same way we did growing up.

Tweens and teens need more strategies than “be kind”, “don’t worry about them,” “just walk away,” or “let’s hope tomorrow is better”… because those strategies don’t work when someone wants to hurt you. They actually equal social avoidance, which is greatly impacting our kid’s wellbeing and psychological safety. Let’s define social avoidance as the repeated tendency to withdraw from or avoid everyday social situations that feel uncomfortable, uncertain or emotionally risky. This strategy is causing them the greatest harm.

They need to know:

  • how to interrupt something unsafe
  • how to get out and get help quickly
  • how to hold their ground without becoming the next target
  • And yes, I would absolutely send my kids to self-defence classes.

Unfortunately, kids are often targeted because perpetrators look for those they perceive as isolated or unlikely to speak up which is exactly why empowerment changes the equation.

Empowerment matters. I want to gift protective skills to every adolescent and build communities that safeguard kids who are most vulnerable.

When kids feel capable, they don’t stay silent. They step forward. And that’s how we start to shift what’s tolerated.

One conversation you can have with your adolescent tonight:

Let’s talk about what you would do if something happened at school like this.

Why? 

Then walk through it together:

  • Where would you go?
  • Who would you tell?
  • What would you say?
  • How would prioritise your own safety?

And then listen…. really listen. They might not have as many options as we think they do. I have learnt that adolescent culture works so differently than we want it to. Remember, kids don’t rise to the occasion, they fall back on what they’ve practised. And right now, too many of them haven’t practised anything at all.

My next book which is coming out July 31st is in response to this, and the breakdown of relationship skills this generation is facing. I can’t be more ready to share it.