It can ' t be the fat my mum has the back pain tooHuh ? my mum is fatter than meOh <| sep |> So freaking boss . You both have your priorities sorted <| sep |> uh huh . because incriminationprohibition has always shaped behaviour as it should . si agree with a lot of what you said around the other stuff . But I can ' t agree with what you said about criminalisation . i ' ve always believed that bullying came from a place of fear . Of the bully needing to feel power because of their own insecurity , in a broad sense . To make it topical , one possible reason for the young fellow being bullied could be that the boys in question felt threatened by a young man who didn ' t fit into their limited view of manhood . We have laws for assault that can deal with bullying when it gets out of control . But at some stage , prevention is better than a cure . Preventing things from getting to the courts and preventing 2 young lives from ever being destroyed . Atleast I believe its preferable to have 2 young people be completely whole , than to destroy the life of the bully because he ruined the life of his victim . That strikes me as punitive and petty . Its exactly the same kind of behaviour that a bully resorts to . Reaching for a bigger stick , upping the stakes and making everything worse because you can ' t be seen to be weak . This disaster is an example of how bad our mental health system is for young people . Not only for the victims either , the perpetrators need often as much if not more help than those that have been bullied . You talk about criminalisation being a start . Its not . Its what cowards do when they don ' t have the courage to face up to the problem . When they feel pressure to do something but don ' t have the bravery to actually solve the problem . Here ' s the problem , we have children who are maladjusted and resort to bullying to cope with their world . The solution to that is fairly obvious . If my car isn ' t running right , i take it to a mechanic . If my puppy isn ' t growing up right , I take him to a vet . If my son is a bully , I take him to a mental health professional . Not because he ' s broken , but because I know things aren ' t right and they should be better . Its my belief that every school should have a full time psychologist on site . That mental health should be taught extensively and less about all the other shite that isn ' t nearly as dangerous , eg . teen car crashes . But while mental health remains a taboo , we won ' t have anything approaching a solution . We ' ll continue to have cowardly suggestions like the above that will never , ever change a thing .