From personal experience, schools turn a blind eye to most incidents of bullying, especially verbal bullying, which too many teachers tend to think is harmless. That's far from the truth.

Most people are susceptible to losing self-confidence and withdrawal if they are mocked, but children/teens particularly so. If their self-esteem is constantly battered during their crucial developmental stages, they could well suffer for decades to come.

Practising verbal bullying in childhood also trains a person to be callous in adulthood, which I see being a major source of crime and hatred.

Mild physical bullying (like tripping someone up) is usually ignored as well. Only actual fights tend to draw attention, and even then, all that usually comes out of it is summary detention/suspension, which makes no attempt to get to the heart of the issue.

Schools need to teach the bully constructive ways to act, and the bullied non-violent and non-self-destructive ways to respond. Sounds like common sense, but there are so many children and teens (heck, even many adults) who simply don't know these things.

I agree, they say they're doing a whole bunch to fix the problem but when someone gets picked on, they just look the other way.

It has to change i mean come on the suicide rate is going up, school shootings are more and more frequent come on

I think it does, i mean it does very little and is often only a catalist to the problem however having said that, i dont know how to improve it.

I strongly think that the ways school handles bullying should change. The bullying rate in school keeps increasing and there have been many suicides resulting from bullying in school so that alone tells us that whatever methods the schools are using are obviously not working. I think that first students needs to be educated about the consequences of bullying and the serious harm it can do to another student's life in order to make them aware of the negative effects of their actions. Next, for students that still goes around bullying other students, there should be some form of juvenile action that seeks to help their behavior or some form of court sanctions that extends to the schools where students bully other students. Detention and punishment seems not to be working at all because students tends to retaliate against the school discipline system.

The Principal needs to call in the parents of the troublesome child and lay down the law that the next time he bullies another student, he gets expelled.