Bullying has changed. Our response should change, too.

Utah’s high schools are preparing to reopen. For many students, it will be a time of joyful reunion, of plans and of hope for the upcoming school year.

For my daughter, it has been a source of acute dread due to the ongoing bullying she had experienced since 5th grade in Utah schools, without effective remediation.

Throughout junior high and high school, my daughter has endured severe bullying at her schools. This bullying, which we believe has been largely ignored by the administration despite repeatedly voicing our concerns, caused a mental breakdown and forced my daughter to take most of her classes online last year. That’s how unsafe she felt within the walls of her own high school. Her nervous system became locked in fight, flight or freeze when she tried again to attend classes in person.

As a parent, I understand the challenges of restraining and preventing bullying in our day and age: Its virtual nature has dematerialized it.

There was a time when bullying began at the school entrance and ended there. The victims could go home and have a temporary respite from its claws. As cruel as the verbal, physical and psychological bullying was at school — it had a time limit, and it often had witnesses as well.

The disparaging insults and physical hits could be halted in hallways or on the school grounds.

But the virtual nature of modern bullying has made it nearly impossible to track and to reprehend, and the perpetrators know that all too well.

Bullying has morphed into an unseizable bogey. It is no longer contained within the school walls. It crawls into our children’s bedroom, phones and homes. It follows them wherever they go, and their nervous system can’t catch a rest.

Back in 2017, my family moved back to the United States from southern France because both my daughters wanted an “American high school experience.” The year we arrived in Utah, my youngest daughter experienced steady fat-shaming in her 4th grade year.

The modern version of bullying might be called “cyberbullying,” but the word often remains too abstract to convey the very real suffering it causes. It is violence without witnesses, without traces, without respite.

On Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok or Discord, teenagers know how to circumvent the system. They can create private groups, send ephemeral messages that disappear as soon as the recipient reads it, delete evidence and hide behind pseudonyms. They can protect themselves with a technical proficiency that few adults possess. And meanwhile, the victim is alone, trapped, left without immediate support and sometimes destroyed.

This form of bullying is all the more pernicious because it leaves no lasting mark to catch. There are no visible bruises or scribbled notes in a notebook. There are only lengthening silences, crumbling self-confidence, sleep disturbances, a fading gaze and sometimes a teen who completed the ultimate act of relief from pain: suicide.

And, too often, we adults see nothing.

Faced with this reality, a response is essential: We must stop perceiving bullying as if it were a problem to be extinguished after the fact. It is time to prevent it upstream, where it begins: in social dynamics, power imbalances, the culture of silence and the trivialization of digital violence.

This requires collective mobilization of parents, school administrative teams and social platforms. We must take the following action:

Schools must educate students on empathy, digital citizenship and the role of witnessing.

Parents must be trained in their children’s digital practices, even when they feel overwhelmed.

Platforms must stop playing blind and implement effective, accessible and rapid reporting mechanisms.

Laws must be clearly enforced, even with minors, because online harassment is a serious psychological offense, whether you’re 13 or 30.

And above all, we must listen to young people themselves. Their voice is valuable. My daughter and I have heard the following so many times: “Do you have any evidence? No? Then we can’t do anything about it.”

Young people know what goes on behind the scenes in their digital lives. They are the ones who hold the codes, the customs, the barefaced truths we don’t always dare to face.

Preventing bullying isn’t just about punishment. It’s about changing the culture. Teaching young people that it’s courageous to stand up to the pack, that it’s noble to be an active witness, that it’s possible to make amends and repair hurts, to ask for forgiveness, to grow their sense of self in ways other than by crushing others.

It’s time to break out of denial. Bullying is not “just a joke.”

“Virtual” does not mean the impact is any less “less serious.” It kills, sometimes literally.

That’s why we must act, and we must act together — not when the damage is already done, but now. Because the pain of a bullied teenager, even online, is very real. And because school must once again become what it should never have ceased to be: a place of learning, connection and safety.

(Lyna Tévenaz) Lyna Tévenaz is a psychotherapist with Wasatch Family Therapy in Sandy.

Lyna Tévenaz is a psychotherapist with Wasatch Family Therapy in Sandy, a writer and a mother of two daughters and a mini Australian Shepherd. Originally from France and New York City, she has lived in the Salt Lake area since 2017.

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