Bullying: a reality that kills
Science is clear. A recent meta-analysis reviewing the relationship between bullying and the risk of suicide in children and adolescents (Holt et al., 2023) shows that bullied teenagers are up to six times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. Six times. What would we do if a disease multiplied the likelihood of losing a child by six? Well, bullying does. Silently. Daily. In every school. In every classroom.
And it doesn’t just kill from within. It kills for real. In the UK, a cohort study with thousands of people revealed that those bullied in childhood had double the risk of completed suicide in adulthood. This is not an exaggeration. It’s statistics.
But this article isn’t about numbers. It’s about faces. The face of the child who no longer wants to go to school. The face of the one who laughs to keep from crying. The face of the parent who doesn’t understand why their child has changed. The face of the teacher who senses something, but doesn’t know how to act. All are part of this story. And we are all, in some way, part of it.
Because bullying isn’t a problem of three: the bully, the victim, and the witness. It’s a collective symptom. Of character we fail to educate. Of empathy we fail to practice. Of courage we fail to reward.
The bully isn’t always a monster. Sometimes it’s simply a child who never learned to manage frustration, who found in humiliation a way to feel powerful. The victim isn’t weak: it’s someone left alone in the face of the group’s indifference, lacking tools to face adversity without sinking. And the witness, that often forgotten one, is the person who could change the most… but almost never does. Because they lack moral courage? Empathy to feel another’s injustice as their own? Out of fear? Pressure? Or because no one taught them to intervene?
The only real way to prevent bullying
Character education is forming the awareness that’s missing when the teacher isn’t watching. It’s cultivating empathy, compassion, and the courage to stand up when everyone is silent. It’s educating children to see another human being, even when they scream silently, hoping for understanding and help in someone else’s eyes. It’s teaching that staying silent in the face of injustice is also being a perpetrator.
And no, it’s not enough to punish the bully or protect the victim. Something much harder must be done: forming good people. Not obedient. Not brilliant. Good. And this is done every day. At home. In the classroom. Through example. And everything else will follow.
Do we want to prevent bullying? Then let’s not just teach a curriculum. Let’s teach respect. Inclusion. Defending the weak. Not laughing at cruel jokes. Asking for forgiveness. Being brave. Loving without shame.
And when a child does this—when they reach out to the peer everyone ignores, when they say “enough” to the bully, when they raise their voice even while trembling—let’s celebrate that act as if they had won an Olympic medal. Because in that moment, they’ve won much more: they may have saved a life.
I don’t believe in protocols to eradicate bullying. But I do believe in character. And character isn’t inherited; it’s educated. Or it isn’t. And then what’s already happening happens: teenage suicides, broken childhoods, entire generations learning to survive… instead of learning to live together.
When we remember this day each year, let’s not ask children to speak. Let’s listen to them. Educate them. And above all, accompany them.
Because where character isn’t educated, bullying runs unchecked.
And it has run unchecked for far too long.
Mª Asunción Rey Ballesteros
Director of Character Education Programs, Fundación Parentes
