AN important question overhanging Lee Hirsch’s doco about peer-bullying in the US is, should it be shown to children as a school activity? 

Unsurprisingly, the film does not examine its potential to push budding bullies beyond just thinking about doing it. In school rooms, offices, playing fields, buses and victims’ homes, Hirsch has filmed bullying in progress, interviewed law-enforcement officers and recorded a high-school deputy principal questioning bullies.

But he gives scant treatment to the influences leading bullies to attack weaker kids.

Despite its clear and unrestrained intention to expose the problem, energised by distressing case stories including two teenagers whose suicides Hirsch examines in interviews with anguished parents, I and a retired teacher left the film feeling deeply pessimistic. A combination of limited powers to react vigorously, and the difficulty of getting kids to tell it like it is, stifled attempts by school staff and law-enforcement officers to deal with it. Victims who look unattractive or don’t conform with schoolyard behavioural norms or, like one 16-year-old girl, are in no doubt about divergent sexuality, coped in their own way with varying degrees of success.

A well-intentioned public movement organised by parents of one of the young suicides to oppose bullying seemed unaware of the harsh reality confronting it.

But we had not seen, nor did we feel confident that there might ever be, a map showing a path to eradicating schoolyard bullying. That perhaps is the film’s ultimate statement, for parents to think about and pray that it never involves their innocent children from either direction.

At Greater Union