Bullying just not on in any situation

It is easy, as adults, to consider that teenagers have it good while you go about paying the bills and sheltering them from real life.

But teenagers do have real lives and they do live with stresses. They have deadlines and pressures. They worry about money. And they get bullied, sometimes at a level of cruelty and injustice adults can barely comprehend.

Cyber-bullying is easily one of the most debilitating and insidious stresses faced by youngsters, and I welcome new law reforms to recognise the damage it does.

As adults, we have adult mechanisms to counter bullying, which basically involve reporting it and expecting action. We are protected by employment policies, tribunals, lawyers and law. If our reputation is lowered, we can sue. We have rights.

So, for that matter, have teenagers. Schools have strategies and policies in place and will act on bullying.

Yet I worry that youngsters perceive that what happens among their peers has to be endured among their peers.

Meeting homework deadlines, being literate and numerate and learning to relate to your peers are character-building, and a big enough set of tasks for teenagers.

Ongoing, continual fear from cyber-bullying is not character-building. It is ongoing violence against your character and soul, and it is exhausting.

Youngsters want it to stop, to go away. And it could reach a point when the only way out is to close your eyes forever.

So whether or not the new laws go through, it's my hope parents, teenagers and schools treat bullying as completely unjustified criminal harassment in a teenager's 'day job' at school, and act on it swiftly.