The Education Department of South Australia has recently delivered it’s ‘Bullying Prevention Strategy’, which was brought into being by the State Liberal Government as a replacement for the Safe Schools program.

Notably absent from the strategy document was any LGBT agency, any LGBT youth service provider, any gender or sexuality support or advocacy group, any of the community mental health services which deliver support in the community, or ShineSA who delivered Safe Schools on behalf of the previous Labor government.

On a side note, SA Health was involved in the development and soon to be delivery of this strategy… SA Health… Who so woefully mismanages their own staff bullying each other that over one hundred staff per day are absent due to bullying and fatigue, were involved in the development of a bullying strategy.

The main website for the strategy as well as the attached video were strongly worded on how the strategy would “increase compliance and … accountability” with the strategy, but in the 30 page policy detail, there’s little that actually expands on how that will happen. There’s one day supposed to be a reporting tool (I’ll hold my breath) to track and report publicly on bullying trends for individual schools; but this fails to tell us if the details available will include things like classification (race, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression) and makes no mention of a provision for students or parents to report their own incidents.

The “bullying database” is actually more of a worry than it may seem on the surface.

The bullying database is, assumedly going to be administered by Education SA. The department that can’t even get schools to report on attendance is supposed to make sure they also provide extensive reporting on bullying incidents. Government schools have fewer staff per student than ever previously, with teachers already spending a lot of their time working on other student data reporting instead of face-to-face with students. If the bullying data is then taken on my administrators the reports might never be made; Ms S might not understand how Mustafa being teased for growing his mustache is related to his religious beliefs. Mr G might not be interested in reporting a fight when he’s guilty of hitting two students (as punishment for calling him by his first name during sports) himself. Mr F might not want to have the school’s fundraising efforts falter because the school has too many incidents reported, so he chooses to handle gay taunts “in-house” because who really cares about the gay kid?

Much like Iraq, you can’t have “oppression of homosexuals” if you refuse to believe that homosexuals exist in your country (or school).

The lack of external reporting mechanisms is also troubling. Bullying is a tough subject to bring up. I know, I was bullied relentlessly throughout my school days. Especially with sensitive subjects like sexuality, reporting incidents to staff was and is rare. Often times, students tell those who ask about how reports of bullying, violence, abuse, in school grounds or at home fall on deaf ears. External reporting mechanisms for students, parents, and community workers would remove some of the administrative barriers that might stop reports being made, especially by minority groups.

External reporting mechanisms should also be coupled with external and independent management. Departments and their reports are subject to the whims of the Minister of the day, and data unhelpful to future campaigning is already frequently buried.

The bullying database also means that there will be a convenient list of troublesome students… both those who bully and those who feel empowered to complain that could be utilised by schools, and lets be explicit here; expensive private schools who have reputations to uphold, to weed out transferring students who might cause a ruckus. We can’t say this won’t happen because private schools have already set a precedent by refusing to accept students with disabilities.

Efforts could have been made to make the strategy abuse-proof, or at least to illustrate that the know how and intend to make it abuse-proof; but they didn’t. They could have talked more about the targeted strategies for dealing with they common types of bullying; race, gender, sexual orientation… but they obviously and very deliberately avoided doing so.

The report is full of action words and assuring whispered nothings. It’s an exercise at making the Minister, the Premier, and the Education Department look like they care. The proof will be in the delivery of the strategy over the next three years and how much of the database and compliance mechanisms ever get implemented.