Let’s change the story on bullying

This piece was published on the Herald for Pink Shirt Day, May 16 2025.

Today I’m proudly wearing my Pink Shirt. Pink Shirt Day is all about speaking up and working together to stop bullying. It’s about being an upstander for healthy relationships, free from bullying behaviour – and not being a bystander if we see it happening.

It’s about inclusion, and more than that, valuing the diversity that we all bring by being ourselves.

This includes the incredible diversity of our children and young people in all its forms – including Rainbow, whaikaha, Māori, Pacific, resettled – and celebrating differences.

As the independent advocate for all children in New Zealand, to me, Pink Shirt Day is a call to action. Every child and young person should be safe, supported and included in their schools and all the spaces that they exist in.

A global UNICEF Report Card about children’s wellbeing, published this week, shows the depth of the problem our youth face when it comes to bullying.

Out of 36 countries across the OECD and EU, it’s New Zealand’s children and young people who are experiencing the second highest rate of bullying.

It’s our youth who, on the data available in the Report Card, have the highest rate of suicide.

To be clear, we are sitting at the exact opposite end of the rankings to where I want us to be. To where I know we can be.

As Chief Children’s Commissioner, I spend a lot of my time in communities throughout the country, meeting children and young people, listening carefully to what they tell me.

I visit them in their schools, marae, clubs, events, and in the organisations they find support in, like youth one-stop-shops. I ask them about their lives, dreams, the challenges they are facing and the solutions from their perspectives.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed a topic that keeps coming up: bullying.

Children and young people are increasingly telling me about the bullying they are facing, often at school, and that it’s making them feel unsafe and sad. It’s affecting their confidence and mental health, relationships, ability be in school, learn and have fun.

To basically just be a kid, having a good childhood.

Rainbow – including transgender – youth are brave in frequently raising this issue with me. They tell me they want to be able to be themselves, safe in our communities, with flourishing mental health.

Disabled children and young people tell me about wanting to grow up in a country where their difference is seen as a strength, where they can fully participate in all aspects of their lives.

And mokopuna Māori, Pacific and refugee children tell me about the racist bullying that they experience at school and in our communities, and that they want to be able to celebrate and share their cultures, feeling a true belonging in this place that they are tangata whenua, or which is their home.

I completely support all of these aspirations – and I know that if we work together to better respect and value them, we can end bullying.

The solutions are right in front of us – they come from children and young people themselves, and the adults around them.

Every school should have a clear bullying prevention plan, and the Ministry of Education should hold them accountable for this. Children and young people should be involved in developing prevention plans and putting them into practice. For example, a number of schools I’ve recently visited have student leaders who are co-leading such plans into action, getting all students involved, supported by their principals and teachers.

All children and young people should be able to learn what healthy relationships look like. This should start in the first 2000 days, role-modelled throughout childhood and adolescence, including through holistic relationships and sexuality education, as ERO has clearly recommended.

Parents have a role to play too – as key role models, and to support their children and young people to know where to seek help if they are bullied, and to stand up for others.

I’d like to see the Ministers of Education, Youth and Mental Health join up to back a country-wide child and youth bullying prevention plan, informed by good data about the problem – and I’m ready to work with them, and children and young people, on that.

Changing our story on bullying needs to start afresh this Pink Shirt Day. Are you in?

Dr Claire Achmad is Kaikōmihana Matua – Chief Children’s Commissioner at Mana Mokopuna – Children and Young People’s Commission.