Reports of school bullying in Japan up 180%

The number of reported cases of school bullying surged to 198, 108 last year, 2.8 times more than the roughly 70,000 cases reported the year before, the education ministry said Tuesday. The ministry attributed the increase to intensified efforts by schools to learn of and report bullying. Official conducted an emergency survey on bullying from April to September 2012 following the suicide of a male high school student in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, and confirmed some 144,000 cases. The number reported in the following October-March period was about 54,000. The number surged in fiscal 2012 because boards of education across the country started making more efforts to identify bullying through additional measures, which helped uncover case that were previously not brought to light, the education ministry said. (Continue reading) Japantimes.co.jp

and there is another shocking report about a teenager committing suicide after being bullied..

The suicide of a 13-year-old boy in southern Japan after classmates systematically bullied him-even making him “practice” suicide-while teachers ignored the abuse or laughed has promoted soul-searching among educators across the country. One of the boy’s last acts was to text his tormentors and leave voice mails for them to say, “I am going die.” They texted him back to say, “You should die.”

The middle school student, whose name has not been released, jumped from his 14th floor apartment in the city of Otsu last October after enduring heartrending tales of abuse at the hands of his classmates. His father filed several reports with the police, but officers never accepted them, saying that they could not prove that bullying led to his suicide, according to Japanese media reports. (Continue reading) abcnews.go.com

This type of news shakes me to the core..this is horrific. Bullying happens everywhere..not only in Japan. I’ve witnessed pretty bad bullying in my middle school, and bullied kids often feel ashamed, harassed and start to question if they should even be alive. Because kids need to take the entrance exam to go to the high school, bullied kids in middle school are screwed. They cannot focus on studying, and my another question is what this boy’s parents were doing..The report says the boy’s father has filed police reports but it wasn’t aggressive enough. If my kid is going through school bullying, I would have done a lot more. Definitely we can’t wait until the victim actually commits suicides. I hope that bullies are legally prosecuted and the parents of these kids will pay the price.