SINGAPORE : One in four secondary school students is a victim of bullying and they experience it at least twice a week.

The survey of 500 youths found that most of them were bullied by their classmates and some victims even became bullies themselves.

"It started when I entered Secondary school. Some boys in my class were calling me names and it spread to almost the whole school. I felt really sad and it affected my studies a lot. The bully incident kept running through my mind and I cannot concentrate," recalled "Jim", who was a victim.

The 15-year-old is not alone. Social workers find that a quarter of secondary school students face verbal or physical bullying at least twice a week.

They are subject to name calling, vulgar language, false rumours and even physical violence, mainly by their own classmates.

The Children's Society feels that schools and teachers can do more, by coming up with ground rules against bullying.

"If it is purely name calling, ostracising, although it happens many times to a particular victim, some schools or teachers in fact see it as very trivial. They don't see that it's important unless it's a fight or somebody is being harmed physically. Only then will they take serious action," said Tan Bee Joo, a social worker with Children's Society.

"You never know how that particular victim will take things and what it will do to their confidence level. And you don't know whether they are strong enough to take the bullying or not. So I think any bullying is a no, the student has done nothing to deserve such behaviour," added Tan.

To get an even distribution of students across gender, educational level and races, surveyors used a random sampling method on a pool of households, and found that the victims of bullying were evenly distributed across all these groups, although a majority of bullies were boys.

And some of the victims actually became bullies themselves.

"It's a vicious cycle. If I'm being victimised and I don't know where to vent my frustrations, I'll begin to think that people are so unkind to me, so why do I need to be kind to other people. So they become bullies themselves," said Tan.

Almost 40 percent of victims also reported that they took revenge on their bullies.

The Children's Society says it is important that victims not take things into their own hands but seek help from counsellors, teachers or friends.

Bullies too need to be counselled, as social workers note that they tend to get in trouble with the law later in life.

- CNA /ls