London, June 22: A coroner said on Friday that anti-bullying policies at his school failed to protect an Australian teenager driven to take his own life by persecution on- and offline.
The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that Deputy New South Wales Coroner Malcolm MacPherson recommended that schools with more than 500 students should have fulltime counselors. The state needs clear policies on when police should be informed about school violence, he said.
Alex Wildman, a student at Kadina High School in Lismore, was 14 when he killed himself in July 2008.
It has been reported that the boy had transferred to Kadina in Lismore four months before his death. MacPherson said he had also been bullied at a Sydney high school.
According to MacPherson, Alex was called names online and in school and subjected to physical assault. Teachers apparently did not realize what was happening until two days before his suicide, he further said.
“I’m only gonna keep bashing him till he learns,” a schoolmate wrote online, a week before his suicide.
MacPherson further noted that after that, Alex was assaulted three times. An onlooker used a cellphone to record the last beating but a deputy principal deleted it instead of showing it to police.
–Agencies–