Transcript - Sunrise
NATALIE BARR: Australia's school bullying crisis is reaching breaking point. So, this week, Education Ministers from around the country will come together to desperately work on a national plan to tackle this issue. It comes as reports of online bullying surge almost 500%. That's in the last five years. It's hoped the review will finally create a consistent nationwide response to protect our kids. It follows several tragic incidents of young Australians like 12 year old Charlotte O'Brien taking their own lives. For more, we're joined by Federal Education Minister Jason Clare. Good morning to you.
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Morning, Nat.
BARR: Bullying a 500% increase, teachers resigning, young kids taking their lives. What do you think the answer is?
CLARE: There's no single answer. What we know is that this is getting worse, not better. It's not just push and shove in the playground, it's not what it was when we were kids. And a big part of it is the internet, because now bullying can follow you home after school and you can cop it day or night. And what's worse is it's not just a comment to you or a couple of others in the playground. The whole world can see it. Which explains why in the most heartbreaking examples you've seen, people take their own life. Well, what we see in those statistics, Nat, is that about 50% of young people say they've been bullied online and 13% have been told to kill themselves online. That gives you an idea of the seriousness.
BARR: Horrific. And we often have people writing in; parents, grandparents, desperate, saying, “We've gone to the school, no one's helping us, please help us”. So, what can you, as the heads of the Education Departments do?
CLARE: Yeah. Well, this review, which was led by two experts in this area, talk to parents exactly like that, including mums and dads whose children took their own life. So, we've got the, I guess we've got the benefit of their awful, tragic experience. And they've said that, they've said a big part of the problem is often that it takes too long after the bullying starts for the school to act. There are schools that do great jobs here, but this is a national problem. We need a national standard to how we go about it. So, parents are telling us schools have got to act really quickly, to nip it in the bud. Teachers are telling us that they need more tools or assistance about what to do and how to do it, and also better training about how they go about it. So, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, but trying to make sure that the best approaches are applied everywhere.
BARR: And everyone’s on the same page. Okay, let's just quickly talk about social media and the ban coming up. We're hearing this morning that teens, they're smart, they're crafty. We know that, we were once. They're already finding loopholes. Dozens of accounts already have ‘account owned by Mum’, or they're adding ‘plus Mum’. They're putting their surname on, they're putting images of their parents on their account. They're moving to apps like Lemon8, which is a clone of Instagram. Do you think this ban is going to work or are they already ahead of us?
CLARE: There's always going to be young people that try and get around it. There's young people that can get access to alcohol, you know, at the moment.
BARR: Are there?
CLARE: Well, there certainly are. But we've still got laws that say you can't sell alcohol to people under the age of 18. So, I think we've got to accept here, I don't expect this is going to be perfect, but I do expect that it's going to make a difference, that it's going to help. All the pressure's on mums and dads at the moment to get young people off social media. The pressure should be on the companies. And so that's what this is about. We're putting the asset on companies like Instagram saying “you've got the technology, you know what works, help us to help our kids”.
BARR: And then we've got to get heavy with them. Okay, Jason Clare thank you for coming in here.
CLARE: Thanks Nat.