Is it? When I worked at the NSW Department of Education our schoolyard bullying rates of measured violence in schools weren't that different from places like Switzerland and France. Sure, there's more to bullying than kids throwing punches, and that just represents a subset of what bullying is, but it's a standout metric that I remember finding.
That's not to say that bullying was 'acceptable' ... just that Australia (or at least NSW) wasn't that particularly noteworthy (for better or worse).
What I can say is Australian schools are better now than they were when I was a kid. That's not exctly worth a pat on the back, however. It was almost considered acceptable that school simply be an extension of the hard knocks style of education.
One of the biggest predicaments of secondary school across Australia and challenging bullying is it's often cyclical. You have kids aged 12/13 rubbing shoulders with students 16+. And we found a significant correlation to suffering bullying at the hands of older students resulting in turn when the shoe is on the other foot, those kids who were bullied would in turn bully younger students.
There's a couple of factors for this. Bullying leads to poorer grades, reduced classroom participation, and thus their total engagement at school was often measured by their capacity to endure, and then reciprocate, violence. In terms of ostracism and psychological or social sabotage, we also found young girls exposed to this environment would in turn mimic it once they had established their own cliches of participating female students.
The problem is you can easier count the number of times students send eachother to the NO ... it's harder to calculate just how much a student may be suffering social and psychological sabotage by other students.
That being said, there'sbeen multiple initiatives to check bullying in shools, and once again the situation is proving safer in general than it was in the past. It's a bit much to expect teachers to confront cyberbullying when it happens off school grounds. Things like trying to gain dirt on fellow students for the sake of emotional and social sabotage material is infinitely harder to check. Let's face it ... teachers have enough on their plate without having to treat the whole of the internet as if an extension of their ground duty.
If you want a really basic answer to why cyberbullying is a problem across the OECD, it's simply a matter of ready access to the internet at all times. Students go to school now with three or more devices capable of making an internet connection.
The internet is a part of the school ground, but no school on Earth has enough teachers to treat it as such. Some classes you would confiscate up to three phones before its end ... phones specifically and only, not including other devices. Some of the mind games you'd see the kids pull against their own throuygh social media. Ugly stuff... and all too often one couple of parents would often not see that as a problem while the victim's parents would make demands trying to counteract it.
And whatever legislation and school initiative you can imagine is not going to be apt to cover all its instances.
