A slew of videos and photos posted online recently have highlighted the issue of bullying among children and adolescents in Chinese schools.

In a video posted online on June 22, a number of girls were seen beating and kicking a fellow female student who knelt down on the ground. The girls involved in the five-minute clip were later found to be junior high school students from Yongxin County in Jiangxi Province.

A day earlier, another video also received much attention in which an eight-year-old boy was beaten and burned with cigarettes by older boys. The clip, during which the boy cried and screamed disturbingly, was filmed in Qingyuan County, Zhejiang Province in May.

An increasing number of school bullying cases have come to the spotlight in China in recent years, and more than 40 cases have been reported so far this year.

Bullying among younger children

According to reports by the website of the Legal Daily, three quarters of school bullying cases take place among high school students, with 42.5 percent of them from junior high schools -- students usually aged at 13 to 15 years old, and 32.5 percent among senior high school students who are between 16 and 18.

Crimes among minors have tended to happen among younger children in recent years, according to a press briefing of China's Supreme Procuratorate in May last year. In the cases among the girls in Jiangxi, only one female student was above 16 while others were between 12 and 16, and in the case involving the boys in Zhejiang, all of them were under 14.

Various motives

The motives behind school bullying are various. Fifty-five percent of the cases are caused by "conflicts in daily life," followed by financial and relationship issues (17.5 percent and 15 percent respectively), according to the same reports by the Legal Daily. In the case of Yongxin County, the girl was beaten as she had been a member of the student union -- a school organization which helps with student management -- and had had conflicts with some of the perpetrators at the school.

Experts have noted that children are now more easily influenced by violence in both actual life and online (as they have easier access to the Internet), while others warn that school management has little interaction with the local public security apparatus, and thus often feel that their hands are tied in preventing and addressing problems involving school violence.

In the case of the boys in Zhejiang, media reports say that four out of five of the children are from families of migrant workers who leave their homes in the local villages to go to the county. The parents are having trouble supporting themselves in the cities, let alone caring for their children, according to a local official.

More severe punishment?

Part of the Chinese public who are enraged by the glaring bullying cases have been calling for more severe punishment for minors. Under the current Chinese law, perpetrators under 14 are not subject to any kind of criminal punishment while those who are between 14 and 16 are only punishable for serious crimes such as murder and rape. Statistics show that less than 30 percent of young perpetrators in China are subject to criminal punishment.

Procurators and legal experts are quite divided on the issue of punishments for minors, according to the Procuratorate Daily, a paper run by China's Supreme Procuratorate. Chen Li, an official at the Political and Judiciary Commission under the Central Committee of the CPC and a vocal person on school bullying cases on China's social media, said that China's current Child Protection Law -- which took effect in 1991 -- is too "outdated and lenient" for school bullying, and suggests the country lower the age bar for criminal punishment, while some others, including Ruan Qilin, a criminal law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, believed that parents and schools should devote more time and efforts to the troubled adolescents and that the punishable age for young perpetrators should not be revised due to individual cases.

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