Parents, teachers should unite to root out bullying

Frequent beatings. Waterboarding. Being dragged around by the neck. Being forced to eat crumbs off the floor. Sound like the abuses committed by some U.S. soldiers on suspected terrorists in Abu Ghraib? No, these are what two middle-school boys subjected a classmate to over the past nine months. The victim leapt to his death last Tuesday, leaving a journal of painful recollections of his ordeals.

The word shock hardly suffices to describe the huge impact this incident has had on society. Even more astounding, however, is most experts agree these kinds of grim episodes can happen anytime, anywhere under the present educational and social environment of Korea.

Which is proof that the nation must waste no more time to drive out bullying in and outside of campus, immediately and fundamentally.

Providing the soil for the poison named school violence is the nation’s cold-hearted education system that emphasizes only good grades and unlimited competition. Parents and teachers don’t encourage self-control and consideration for others, just telling them to go to and fight, and win. Equally problematic is the widespread pampering ― and spoiling ― of children by their baby-boomer parents who raise kids that are both violent and weak at the same time.

These parents, themselves victims of this overly-competitive society, can provide better material conditions for their children, but find little time for what the latter direly need ― intimate dialogue and warm counseling. Of no more help to these troubled souls are their teachers, whose foremost concerns are academic records. It is heart-rendering to hear the 13-year-old victim, known by just his surname Kim, gave up telling his plight to grown-ups around him both because of possible retaliation by his rogue friends and because ``the adults would be of little help.”

What all this shows is society must not regard bullying as just harmless games or transient growing pains, but as a crime that can lead one to death.

Under the current Korean system, which is very lenient to offenders, it is often the victims who have to change schools. The education ministry is right to sharply increase the number of school counselors responsible exclusively for preventing bullying and checking cases twice a year, but it must go far further.

The time has long past for Korea to follow examples of America and Europe, where attackers and their parents are subject to legal punishment, jail terms and financial compensation. A majority of Korean students say they avoid scenes of bullying and reporting them to teachers for fear of being branded as tattlers. But some U.S. states and North European nations make it mandatory for students to try to stop bullying on the spot, not to speak of reporting episodes to school authorities.

Scariest of all, news reports say the attackers appear to be very normal students of their age, and don’t even seem to realize what they have really done wrong. It’s less because these boys are little Hides and Jekylls than because they are also victims of the existing system.

Korea should tackle this issue ahead of all else, because these adolescents are the nation’s future.