Bullying and violence. (Youth Monitor: a national roundup of recent press reports on youth issues).

Long-term effects

Research by a team from the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne has found that girls who are bullied as teenagers are more likely than boys to develop anxiety and depression. The study, which involved 2,680 Victorian students at age 13 and then again a year later, showed that more than half of them had been bullied -- having been teased, having had rumours spread about them, having been deliberately excluded from activities or having experienced physical threats or actual violence.

The report on the research project, published in The British Medical Journal, suggests that this debunks the myth that it is depressed teenagers who are picked on, rather than that being picked on causes teenagers to become depressed. Symptoms of depression showed up in one in five of the bullied girls, which was double the proportion amongst the bullied boys. `In this study, in up to 30% of all students with incident symptoms of depression, the symptoms could be attributed to a history of victimisation.... The effect of bullying is clearest for girls [and] it has a significant impact on their future emotional wellbeing' (Advertiser, 1/9/01, p.55; Australian, 1/9/01, p.6; Herald Sun, 1/9/01, p.12).

Internet threats

Research in Western Australia has found that playground bullying is creeping into the home as a growing number of children report feeling threatened via the Internet. Associate Professor Donna Cross, from Curtin University's Centre for Health Promotion, said some children were using Internet chatrooms to threaten classmates by typing notes such as `Watch out for me at school tomorrow'.

`It's a new way of threatening other children and making them feel like they are being watched,' said Professor Cross. `We knew there was face-to-face bullying but we didn't realise the high incidence of electronic bullying.' She said one in six Western Australian school children reported having been bullied at least once a week, either physically or verbally (Sunday Times [Perth], 9/9/01, p.7).