School bullying will not be eliminated with legislation, but the problem can be mitigated through education, a lawmaker told a forum yesterday.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英) said school bullying was a universal problem, adding that the Ministry of Education announced in December that it would formulate an anti-bullying plan and seek legal means to deal with the matter.
“So far, I haven’t seen any concrete measures,” she said. “At the same time, we continue to see school bullying, so the president [Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九)] got angry and said he wanted perpetrators to be dealt with using legislative means.”
However, school bullying is not a legal problem but one of education and it is unlikely any law would effectively prevent bullying, Huang told a panel discussion organized by the Taiwan Brain Trust to examine a policy proposed by the Ma administration to address school bullying.
Huang, who sits on the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, said bullying came in many forms, including physical, verbal, gender and relationship bullying.
Bullying can be prevented through education and counseling, she said.
However, many opportunities to educate against bullying are often lost because most schools use the limited time they have to prepare students for college entrance examinations, she said.
Huang also blamed the media for reporting too much information with too much detail on violent bullying, adding that when legislators tried to legislate media coverage, it caused outrage and opposition.
Huang urged the administration to earmark budgets, and hire professional social workers and counselors in the fight against bullying.
In other countries, the ratio of professional workers to students was 1 to 1,000 or 2,000, she said. In Taiwan, only five of the 22 counties and cities have social workers stationed at schools, when between 1,200 and 2,500 are needed, she said.
Wu Chung-tai (吳忠泰), chairman of the National Teachers’ Association, ROC, said school bullying should not be the sole responsibility of schools and the Ministry of Education, but rather of the Executive Yuan and society as a whole.
“School bullying can be controlled, but it’s unlikely we can eradicate it,” he said.
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