WHEN I was in school, bullying was there – the name-calling, the pushing in corridors, the whispered jokes about my looks or background.
I still carry those memories, though I rarely speak of them.
But what I see today feels different – darker, more vicious. And unlike in my time, it is starting earlier, spreading wider and costing lives.
From the death of 13-year-old Zara Qairina Mahathir, to the 2013 case of 16-year-old Wan Ahmad Faris – found lifeless in his school dormitory toilet – and the loss of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Reserve Officers’ Training Unit (Palapes) cadet Syamsul Haris Shamsudin at 22, the list of bullying tragedies is long. Yet, the cases keep surfacing in our schools and universities.
Each headline hits like a fresh wound. We mourn, we rage on social media, we whisper “how tragic” and then we move on until the next life is lost. Bullying in Malaysia is still not a hot topic; it is treated like a one-off tragedy, not the cultural sickness it
has become.
Bullying has always existed but now, even children in primary school are doing it. The cruelty is not confined to classrooms or dorms; it follows victims home through their phones.
In my day, if you were teased at school, the shame stopped at the school gate. Today, it is filmed, shared, mocked and replayed a thousand times online. The playground has turned into a stage and cruelty has an audience.
So why is this happening? Are teachers less strict? Are schools too eager to protect their reputations instead of their students? Or have we, as parents, grown too busy, too quick to defend our children, even when they are wrong? Maybe it is all of this.
Maybe it is the kind of society we are building where children learn more from TikTok than from textbooks, more from influencers than from parents and more from silence than from action.
When I look back at my childhood, I remember that bullies existed but there was a line they rarely crossed. Maybe because adults were watching more closely or maybe because shame still worked as a deterrent. Now, shame
has been weaponised, humiliation is entertainment and violence is content. A child’s pain is just another video to scroll past.
As a mother of two, this terrifies me. My son is 10, my daughter is seven and autistic. I worry constantly. What kind of environment are they stepping into? Will my daughter, who is already navigating the world differently, be mocked for the way she communicates? Will my son learn that silence is safer than speaking out? Will teachers step in when cruelty erupts or will they turn away because it is “not serious enough?”
I don’t want my children to be either victims or bullies but I know prevention requires more than just parenting. It takes a whole ecosystem – teachers who protect, schools that act firmly, parents who hold their children accountable and a society that rewards kindness instead of aggression. Right now, we don’t have that; we have fragments.
The question is: What has changed between then and now? Technology, for one, social media has stripped empathy from interactions. Children learn early that attention is currency and cruelty is the fastest way to earn it.
But it is also about authority. When I was a child, teachers had a kind of unquestioned authority. Today, some teachers fear parents more than students. Discipline has become a minefield and somewhere along the way, the protection of children became negotiable.
Here is the truth: children are not born cruel; they learn cruelty. They see it at home, in politics and how we treat one another. They absorb the lessons we don’t even know we are teaching – that mocking is funny, power means domination and silence means survival.
If we want to change the bullying culture, we must change the environment that makes it thrive. That means schools must stop treating bullying as “normal growing pains”. Because it is not; it is violence – psychological and physical – that can shatter lives.
Teachers must be trained to identify, intervene and prevent it. Parents must be willing to hear uncomfortable truths about their children instead of lashing out at schools.
Children must be taught empathy deliberately as they are taught mathematics, not left to pick it up by chance.
We must also talk openly about mental health. Victims of bullying often carry invisible scars for years. Some never recover. I know because I am one of them.
I was called fatty and black mamba because of my dark skin, and afro because my hair was short and curly. I feared going to school. Every morning came with a knot in my stomach. And it wasn’t just words – once, a girl slapped and shoved me because I refused to buy her food from the canteen. I carried that bruise on my body but the deeper wound was the silence that followed.
When I finally found the courage to tell my parents, they brushed it off: “Just ignore it.” But ignoring did not stop the fear, erase the names or heal the wound. That is why I know bullying is not confined to the school compound; it lingers long after the bell rings.
And now, as a mother, those old scars make me more afraid for my children. What frightens me most is not that bullying exists; it always has. What frightens me is how much we have normalised it and how little urgency we show to change it.
We need to ask ourselves: What kind of children are we raising and what kind of future are we shaping? Because the cruelty we tolerate in schools today will become the cruelty we live with as a society tomorrow.
And if we don’t draw the line now, we may one day look back and realise that we allowed an entire generation to bleed in silence.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun. Comments: [email protected]
