Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise and speak in favour of Motion No. 385, put forward by my friend and colleague from Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, which I had the honour of seconding this morning. This motion is calling on all of us in the House of Commons to take concrete steps in the prevention of bullying. It is not good enough to say that bullying is someone else's responsibility or to hide behind Canada's notoriously complicated division of jurisdictions. It is not enough to say that this is best left to the local level, and it is clear that whatever we are doing at all levels in government in Canada today to combat bullying is not enough.
It is time for leadership in combating bullying. It is time for leadership right here in the House of Commons. Motion No. 385 calls for the creation of a special 12-member all-party committee to develop a national bullying prevention strategy. By reviewing studies on bullying, we can come to a better understanding of why it happens and what we can do to stop it. Unfortunately, creating an effective anti-bullying strategy is now an urgent need in our society, and for those who call for immediate action, I would like to remind them that effective action requires a strategy.
The prevalence and pervasiveness of bullying is shocking in our society. People can be bullied for any number of reasons, for being too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, for their sexual preference or even their perceived sexual preference or whether they conform to gender norms. I could go on and on with such a list. All forms of bullying are, of course, reprehensible and potentially harmful, but some forms of bullying appear to have more intense consequences. I am talking primarily about bullying based on sexism as it affects young women and girls and bullying based on homophobia, both of which all too often can end in violence, either violence perpetrated by the bullies or in the form of self-harm or suicide by the victims.
I can only speculate, but it appears to me that the deep-rooted sexism and homophobia in our society all too often reinforce and validate the attitudes and actions of bullies. The tragic suicide of Amanda Todd in Coquitlam just a few days ago is powerful testimony to the destructive power of bullying when backed by the oppressive cult of unrealistic body images for young women and the powerful pressures on adolescent women to seek personal validation in sexual activity they may not be ready for. The ongoing cyber bullying that has continued even after Amanda's death is shocking evidence of the need for urgent action.
Recently, many of us felt first-hand here in Ottawa the great sadness and immense sense of loss after the suicide of Jamie Hubley. This case is testimony to the enormous challenges of being one of the only out teenagers in a high school where homophobia often made that pressure unbearable. In the case of Jamie, it led to his suicide.
In contrast to the less well documented link between sexism and bullying, we have specific evidence of the reinforcing link between homophobia and bullying as a result of a study by Egale Canada entitled, “Every Class in Every School”. This was the first national climate survey on homophobia and transphobia in Canadian schools. Egale's survey, conducted in schools across Canada, found that 70% of all students—both LGBT-identified and non-LGBT-identified students—reported hearing homophobic comments every day in school, revealing a hostile climate in our schools toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and gender-variant students.
In this same study, 74% of trans-identified students, 55% of LGB students and only 26% of non-LGBTQ students reported being verbally harassed at school. That means the rates for transgendered students are more than three times those of all other students, and for lesbian, gay and bisexual students, it is more than double the rate for all other students. This is graphic evidence of the extent of homophobic bullying in our schools.
As I said earlier, there are many excuses for bullying, so much so that bullying is happening in our schools at astonishing levels. A separate analysis of Toronto area schools found that a student is being bullied every seven seconds. In a more in-depth study of bullying by the Centre for Youth Social Development at the UBC Faculty of Education, it was found that 64% of kids had been bullied at school,12% were bullied regularly, meaning once or more than once a week, and 72% had observed bullying at school, and of those, only 40% had actually tried to intervene to stop the bullying.
Even more shocking, though, is the fact that 64% considered bullying a normal part of school life and 20% to 50%, depending on the way the question was phrased, said bullying could be a good thing in that it makes people tougher and is a good way to solve problems. These are perhaps the most shocking statistics about the social acceptance of bullying and the failure of those who are around those being bullied to step in, act in their defence and declare the behaviour unacceptable.
Almost 80% of those students in the British Columbia survey pointed out that bullies are often popular and those who enjoy the highest status among their peers in school. They are leaders in schools and leaders in bullying.
As technology has advanced, so have the means of bullying. With social networking, smart phones and the Internet becoming second nature to everyone in Canada, especially young people, these resources become available for bullying, and bullying is now something that can easily happen 24 hours a day, any day of the year. Bullying is no longer a problem that only happens at school or on the playground. As the member for Vancouver Centre so aptly noted, the consequences of bullying spread worldwide very quickly.
We need to take bullying very seriously. The impacts on youth can be drastic and long lasting. Young people who are bullied are more likely to face depression. It is estimated that male victims of bullying are five times more likely, and female victims three times more likely, to be depressed than their non-bullied classmates. People who are victims of bullying are more susceptible to low self-esteem and are likely to suffer from anxiety and illness. Young people who are bullied are much more likely to engage in activities that result in self-harm, including extensive substance abuse.
On top of those personal tragedies, there are societal costs to bullying. Bullying adds to government costs in everything from health care to law enforcement. One of the shocking statistics that I ran across in thinking about bullying was that, of elementary school bullies, one in four will have a criminal record by the time they are 30 years old. Obviously engaging in bullying is an indicator of further problems to come in their lives.
We must reject the idea that bullying is just a fact of life. We must reject the idea that bullying has always been with us and always will be. These behaviours are learned. People are not born with hearts full of hate.
The solution is not to criminalize youth, as some in the House have suggested. Bullying is a vicious cycle in which most of the bullies have at some point been bullied themselves. However, we cannot excuse the bullying; we need to call it by its real name; and we cannot dismiss it as harmless child's play. We need to recognize that bullying is in fact based, too often, on sexism, racism, homophobia and trans-phobia.
The need for action is so obvious and so urgent. What the motion before us today would do is allow us to gain a desperately needed better understanding of bullying so we could then put in place a plan to prevent it from continuing. We need the bullying to stop in order to create a better Canada. We need to take action now. We have seen the hurt of the victims of bullying. We have seen the hurt of parents who have lost their children to bully-related suicides. We have heard the pleas of young Canadians who have lost their friends because it was all too much for them to bear.
The time for action is now. It is time for the House to take a strong leadership role, to take a stand against bullying by passing the motion and getting down to work on finding solutions and developing a strategy to implement them.
I commend the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord once again for bringing forward this motion. I hope to see support for it from all sides of the House.