Does punishing bullies actually reduce bullying in Indian schools? What decades of research say works instead
CBSE has required Anti-Bullying Committees in every affiliated school since 2015. Global research spanning four decades and more than a hundred rigorous evaluations shows which parts of that mandate actually reduce bullying, and which are mostly theatre.
Meera Chandrasekhar | Specialist in child development, wellbeing, and community engagement
India has no single national survey of school bullying comparable to ASER for reading or NFHS for health, and a 2024 scoping review in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect noted plainly that none of the major global bullying reports include Indian data at all. What exists instead is a scatter of regional studies that consistently find high rates using inconsistent definitions: a 2017 study put regular bullying among grade 5 to 8 students at roughly 42 percent, while a large, recent school-based survey of 7,563 adolescents across Himachal Pradesh found 18.41 percent reporting involvement in physical or cyberbullying as perpetrators and 15.60 percent reporting victimisation, using a stricter, standardised questionnaire. The gap between those numbers isn’t a contradiction so much as a measurement problem, and it matters, because researchers define bullying specifically as repeated, intentional harm carried out across a power imbalance, not the same thing as a one-off fight or disagreement between equals.
What does decades of global research say actually reduces it?
Meta-analyses covering more than a hundred rigorously evaluated anti-bullying programmes found that posted rules and punishment alone move the needle far less than trained adult supervision during unstructured time.
Dan Olweus began studying bullying systematically in Norway in the early 1980s, and the programme built on his research, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, remains the most extensively tested intervention in the field. Criminologists Maria Ttofi and David Farrington’s 2011 meta-analysis, covering 44 evaluations of school-based programmes, found anti-bullying interventions reduced bullying and victimisation by an average of 17 to 23 percent, and concluded specifically that programmes inspired by Olweus’s work performed best. A later update by Hannah Gaffney, Ttofi and Farrington, covering 100 independent evaluations, found perpetration fell by roughly 19 to 20 percent and victimisation by 15 to 16 percent where programmes were implemented well. Across both reviews, the components most consistently linked to real reductions were not posters or one-off assemblies but posted rules paired with consistently enforced consequences, adults specifically trained to supervise high-risk unstructured periods like recess and lunch, and multi-component, whole-school approaches rather than isolated activities run once and forgotten.
What does CBSE already require, on paper?
CBSE Circular Acad-17/2015, issued on 9 March 2015, already asks for something close to this. It requires every affiliated school to set up an Anti-Bullying Committee with specific, named membership, the Vice-Principal, a senior teacher, the school doctor, a counsellor, a PTA representative, a management representative, a legal representative and peer educators, and to build confidential, accessible reporting structures for both victims and bystanders. The circular also calls for trained student “Sentinels” to watch for risky situations and specifies that counsellors should be arranged separately for primary, middle, and secondary levels, with particular attention to residential schools where the amount of time students spend together raises the stakes. On paper, this already resembles the multi-component structure the research says works. Whether it functions that way depends entirely on whether the committee actually meets, reviews cases, and holds itself accountable, or exists as a paragraph in the school prospectus that nobody has read since it was written.
Does the school’s responsibility end at the school gate?
Legally, no, and this is where many schools get the law wrong. CBSE Circular Acad-32/2017 on Cyber Safety makes clear that a school’s duty of care extends to bullying that happens between its own students even when the harassment takes place on personal phones, after school hours, entirely off campus. A doctored photo circulated in a WhatsApp group or an Instagram “confessions” page built around a classmate is still the school’s problem to address if the people involved are its own students, not a private matter the school can wave away because the send button was pressed at home. Separately, under Section 19 of the POCSO Act, 2012, any school staff member who becomes aware of a sexual offence against a child, including one carried out digitally, such as circulated intimate images, is legally required to report it to the police. This is not a judgement call left to a teacher’s discretion. Failure to report is itself an offence under the Act.
What to do
Check whether your school’s Anti-Bullying Committee, mandated since 2015, actually meets on a schedule and reviews real cases, rather than existing as a line in the prospectus no one revisits.
Train supervising staff specifically for recess, lunch, and transition periods, since this is one of the few components the research consistently links to measurable reductions, well ahead of posters or one-time assemblies.
Test your school’s confidential reporting channel yourself before assuming it works. Have a colleague try to report a hypothetical incident and see whether it reaches someone who acts on it.
Treat bullying that happens over WhatsApp or social media between your own students as within your school’s responsibility, per the 2017 Cyber Safety circular, regardless of where or when it happened.
If any complaint involves sexual content of any kind, know that Section 19 of the POCSO Act makes reporting to police mandatory for staff, not optional, and treat it accordingly rather than trying to resolve it internally.
Sources: Ttofi and Farrington, “Effectiveness of school-based programs to reduce bullying: a systematic and meta-analytic review,” Journal of Experimental Criminology (2011) · Gaffney, Ttofi and Farrington, “Evaluating the effectiveness of school-bullying prevention programs: an updated meta-analytical review,” Aggression and Violent Behavior (2019) and Campbell Systematic Reviews (2021) · Scoping review of school bullying research in India, Child Abuse & Neglect (2024) · School-based adolescent health survey on bullying, Himachal Pradesh, India · CBSE Circular No. Acad-17/2015, “Prevention of Bullying & Ragging in Schools” (9 March 2015) · CBSE Circular No. Acad-32/2017, “Cyber Safety” · Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, Section 19
