Bullying is a national problem and it requires a national conversation

Nov 23, 2025 News

By Karen Abrams, MBA, AA, Doctoral Candidate

(Kaieteur News) – The Ministry of Education’s plan to build a system to track incidents of bullying in schools, alongside improved reporting and intervention measures, has generated support and discussion, and rightly so. On the surface, the initiative appears straightforward: protect children by identifying aggression early and responding quickly. But the proposal, as currently framed, overlooks a fundamental truth we must confront as a nation. Bullying in Guyana does not begin in the classroom. It begins in the fabric of our society.

Bullying is a national problem and it requires a national conversation

Karen Abrams

Bullying is embedded in the way far too many families resolve conflict, the way some public officials wield authority, the way workplaces enforce discipline, the way we deal with each other on the streets, the way we drive, and even the way some public and private institutions manage dissent. It is a structural legacy shaped by harsh disciplinary norms, authoritarian governance, and generations of learned power imbalance. In our society, we applaud the bullying of our enemies and protest the bullying of our friends, unless the aggressor is more powerful. To target students without examining the cultural soil in which these behaviours take root is to treat the smoke while ignoring the fire.

Research from UNESCO’s Global Status Report on School Violence and Bullying shows that children learn bullying from the adults around them; they internalize what they see; domination, ridicule, intimidation, and reproduce it in the one space where they hold power, the schoolyard.

A 2018 meta-analysis in Child Abuse & Neglect by Tucker, Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, and Hamby confirms that children who experience aggression, shouting, or emotional neglect at home are significantly more likely to bully. Trauma travels, and it travels from the dinner table to the classroom.

International evidence is also clear that punitive approaches alone do not work. The CDC’s 2021 findings on school violence prevention warn that tracking or penalizing students, without pairing these systems with counseling, family intervention, and classroom-wide social-emotional learning (SEL), often leads to increased resentment, worse behavior, and deeper isolation.

Dan Olweus, widely regarded as the father of modern bullying research, developed the foundation for nearly every evidence-based anti-bullying programme used today. His work shows that addressing bullying requires consistent adult modeling, community norms that reject intimidation, and emotional support for both victims and aggressors.

So yes, the Ministry of Education is right to focus on bullying. We cannot build strong learning environments while students are frightened, physically abused, or otherwise humiliated. But bullying in schools is only a symptom. The root cause lies in the wider culture we all need to examine. A tracking system may help record incidents and interventions, but it cannot heal emotional wounds or break the intergenerational cycle that produces both bullies and victims.

If we are serious about protecting our children, we must encourage a national conversation about the environments in which they live and learn. We must invest in counseling, family support programmes, SEL-based curriculums, and school communities that model empathy rather than fear. Without that, solutions will continue to elude us and we will simply be placing the burden for a national failure on the shoulders of children. Guyana’s students deserve far more than another surveillance system. They deserve adults willing to confront the truth and do the hard internal work needed to fix the environment in which they are growing up.

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aggression, bullying, child abuse, Karen Abrams, national problem

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