A screenshot of the video clip of the bullying incident that took place on April 17. (Photo/Xinhua)

A video clip showing a middle school student being slapped by other students also wearing middle school uniforms was posted online on April 17. According to one witness of the incident, the sickening abuse lasted for half an hour. More than 30 middle school students, five or six of whom took turns slapping the victim, picked on the girl because she accidentally captured the image of another girl – who apparently summoned this gang – in the background of a cell phone photo that she was taking outside her school.

It’s believed that school bullying is not as common in China as in the United States, where there have been several well-documented tragic cases of teenagers taking their own lives after bullies at school drove them over the edge. While the exact extent of the problem is hard to ascertain, school bullying is not a negligible or aberrant issue in China.

A 2012 study by researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Province found that of the 8,342 middle school students surveyed in four cities in the province, 18.99 percent had been victims of bullying, 8.60 percent were bullies themselves, and 6.74 percent had both bullied and been bullied by others.

Another study conducted in Hong Kong showed that as many as 76.5 percent of Hong Kong’s primary and middle school students have experienced different forms of school bullying. Verbal abuse, which features in 70 percent of school abuse cases, is the most common form of school bullying in Hong Kong.

Behind the statistics are individuals who live in constant fear, too weak to fight back or too conflict-averse to answer violence or other abuse in kind. More often than not these children and teenagers are too afraid to seek help from their teachers or parents. The incessant abuses from which they suffer erode their self-esteem and make them feel helpless, sometimes leading to deadly consequences.

Xiao Xuan, a 13-year-old girl in Chaozhou, plunged to her death from the top of her apartment building in 2013. In a 200-word SMS to her classmates, friends and family, Xiao Xuan thanked those who “cared about her” and asked a chilling rhetorical question to explain her despair: “Do you know how I lived through each day at school?” At the end of the message, Xiao Xuan vowed she wouldn’t forgive her tormentors even after she died.

No amount of punishment for her bullies could bring Xiao Xuan back to life. To prevent such a tragedy from happening again, schools and parents throughout the country should pay more attention to the issue of school bullying, educate their students and children about how to deal with bullies, encourage victims of bullying to report the perpetrators of the abuse and patiently help them nurse the psychological wounds caused by these bullies. At the end of the day, when our children can’t stand up for themselves, they should know that those who can do so are there for them.

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