‘I feared going to school’

New tools of social media and texting have opened up ways for bullies to hurt people

- Gabrielle Chan

The torment began when she started Primary 1, and ended only when she left the school two years later. New to a popular all-girls' school, a seven-year-old quickly became a target of bullying by more than one group of her peers. A few pupils spread rumours that she had cheated in her exams, while another threw rubbish into her school bag, crushed her homework, licked her snacks and hid her stationery.

A teacher took away an award she had earned for doing well in an assignment because of remarks that other girls had made, and she had to put a padlock on her bag to protect her belongings.

“I noticed something was wrong when my daughter was crying more often,” said her mother, Mrs Rachel Tan (not her real name), a housewife in her early 50s.

Mrs Tan and her daughter both struggled to raise these encounters to teachers or the school, as there was no hard evidence. And when Mrs Tan tried to talk to a teacher about the rumours other girls had spread, nothing came of it.

At one point, Mrs Tan had to help her daughter practise how to defend herself in school. “I imagined helping her practise for oral exams, but not to stand up to her bullies.”

Her daughter escaped her bullies after moving to a new school in 2024, where she is doing better and has made new friends, Mrs Tan said. But she worries that the experience has left her child emotionally scarred, and that she may not easily trust people or form friendships.

While the number of bullying incidents reported to the Ministry of Education (MOE) has been stable in the past decade, observers say teenage bullying is a growing concern, especially with new tools of social media and texting that have opened up ways for bullies to hurt people.

Technology has also drawn attention to cases of physical bullying that emerge online. Most recently in 2024, videos of at least three cases were widely circulated online and in chat groups.