Japanese Bullying Videos Find Their Way Online (Again)
Online evidence of the bullying problem in Japanese schools has once again become a news story after bullies in Saitama Prefecture uploaded some videos to an undisclosed website:
A video of a student being bullied by his classmates at a private high school in Saitama was sent to a website by one of the bullies, prompting school officials to petition the webmaster for its removal.
School officials said one of the six students involved in the attacks, which occurred on May 15 and 29, recorded them using his cell phone and posted them to the website as a joke.
The video shows the victim being kicked in the back. He was not injured on either occasion.
More from the Asahi Shinbun:
At the end of May, the school questioned the students involved in the bullying based on information from students who had witnessed the attacks.
The bullies admitted to their violence, and the school started providing special guidance for them.
But on Wednesday, word came out that the cellphone videos could be seen on the Internet.
“The bullying was malicious and impermissible,” a school official said. “We will work on the mental care of the student who was bullied. At the same time, we will have to implement strict measures against the students who were involved.”
The school plans to hold an assembly for all students on Friday to explain the dangers of irrationally posting materials on the Internet.
What type of “strict measures” the school will take against the students is not clear. Maybe they’ll be forced to watch short anti-bullying commercials? Here’s an example:
Situtations involving bullying are shown, and two students hold up X signs to reflect on how bullying is bad. However, in the end, they realize that they themselves are passively supporting the bullying, so they deliver an X to themselves. We are then shown the message “You too, right?”
Effective?
In a related story, National Police Agency statistics revealed that a total of 886 Japanese students and pupils committed suicide last year, the highest figure since such records were first compiled in 1978. Hopefully education officials are actually taking serious action to reduce bullying in schools here, or we may be in for another depressing year of alarming student suicides…
