China's Guangdong province will punish bully students in schools, with penalties including detention, expulsion, or even criminal liability. These are part of the provincial regulations drafted by the Department of Education and will be effective on December 1 - almost a year following the release of the national plan in addressing school bullying.
The regulations will target the particular behavior of students and bullying will be classified into three levels according to severity. The least serious offenses include slandering on social media, insulting the character of a person, destruction of petty properties, and name-calling. Kicking, slapping, punching, hair pulling, tripping, extortion, forcibly removing clothing will fall under the middle category. For the most severe cases, these will include repeat offenders, using knives or other weapons to assault or threaten the victim, uploading videos or photos of someone being bullied.
Bullies who are at the age of criminal responsibility should face the legal consequences of their behavior. In Chinese criminal law, the minimum age for criminal responsibility is 14, where they committed violent crimes like rape, assault, or murder. According to the South China Morning Post, the new rules will allow schools to investigate bullying claims for 10 days, and they should give punishments. If ever they fail to adequately handle the cases, they will be facing punishments as well.
Meanwhile, a lot of social media users supported the regulations, particularly name-calling considered to be punishable. One Weibo user wrote she'd been called "fat and short" during middle school, and feels bad whenever she hears those words until now.
UNICEF noted peer-to-peer violence and bullying affect roughly 150 million student aged 13 to 15 around the world. The long-term impact of violence and bullying might lead to anxiety, depression, or suicide.
Just last year, Chinese courts received about 800 cases of school violence and half of which were students aged between 16 and 18. A 13-year-old girl killed herself back in January, she jumped from a school building after being beaten by her classmates. In July, a man has been sentenced to death for stabbing nine students at his old school as he allegedly angry over the bullying he experienced at that school.
Among 53 countries and territories, Hong Kong ranked first in terms of the percentage of children who had been bullied at least a few times in a month. The city had 32.3 percent reported cases, Singapore had 25.1 percent, Britain had 23.9 percent, and the United States had 18.9 percent.
