Bullying

If your child is being bullied, or you suspect they might be, it’s stressful. There's the distress of knowing they're being hurt, the helplessness of not being there when it happens, and often a long, frustrating struggle to get the situation taken seriously. Some parents also worry that they should have noticed sooner. This guide is here to help you understand what's happening, what it's doing to your child, and what genuinely helps.

One thing to hold onto from the start: being bullied is never the bullied child's fault, and it isn't a sign of weakness in them. Bullying is something done to a child, and it can be addressed. The most important thing a parent can do for them is show they’re taking it seriously.

If you are worried about your child's safety, contact your GP and ask for an urgent appointment, or call NHS 111. If it feels more urgent than that, do not wait. Call 999 or go to A&E. Your child can talk to Childline free and in confidence on 0800 1111, and you can reach the Samaritans on 116 123 or text SHOUT to 85258 at any hour. Finding Therapy isn't a crisis or emergency service.

What's bullying?

Not every unkindness or fall-out is bullying, and it helps to be clear about the difference, because schools, and sometimes parents, can disagree about whether a situation counts.

Those three features together are what distinguish bullying from ordinary conflict:

• Repeated. It happens again and again, rather than as a single incident.
• Intentional. It's meant to hurt, frighten, humiliate, or exclude.
• A power imbalance. The child being bullied finds it hard to defend themselves or stop it, whether because of numbers, social status, age, size, or something else.

A one-off argument between two children of roughly equal standing, even a heated or hurtful one, is a fall-out, not bullying. It still matters and may need help, but it's a different thing. Holding onto that definition helps when you're advocating for your child, because it moves the conversation with school from "children will be children" to "this is a recognised, repeated pattern that needs a response" ^[2].

The different forms bullying takes

Bullying is far broader than the playground stereotype of physical aggression. It usually falls into a few overlapping types:

• Verbal. Name-calling, taunting, threats, and cruel jokes. This is the most commonly reported form.
• Physical. Hitting, pushing, tripping, spitting, or damaging belongings.
• Social or relational. Deliberately excluding a child, spreading rumours, turning friends against them, or humiliating them in front of others. Because it leaves no marks, this quieter form is often missed, yet it can be just as damaging.
• Cyberbullying. Harassment through messages, social media, group chats and games, covered in its own section below.

Naming the form your child is experiencing helps, both for your own clarity and when you raise it with school.

Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is bullying that follows a child through their phone and screen. What makes it so corrosive is that it offers no safe place to escape: the harassment reaches into a child's bedroom, at any hour, and can be seen by a large audience. Most children who are bullied online are also bullied in person, so cyberbullying rarely sits on its own, and children targeted in both ways tend to fare worst of all ^[3].

It is common, though less common than in-person bullying. In the most recent national figures, around 1 in 5 children aged 10 to 15 in England and Wales, roughly 847,000, had experienced online bullying in a single year, with girls more affected than boys ^[4].

The law has recently caught up with the harm. Under the Online Safety Act 2023, since July 2025 the online services children use, from social media to messaging apps and games, must protect children from a defined list of harmful content that explicitly includes bullying, use age checks, and act on illegal material. The regulator, Ofcom, can fine companies that fail, by up to £18 million or a tenth of their global turnover ^[5]. It does not make cyberbullying vanish, but it gives a parent's report more weight than it used to carry.

Practical steps help. Save screenshots before anything can be deleted, make your own report on the platform as well as helping your child block or mute the account, since your report makes removal more likely, and keep talking with your child rather than simply taking the device away, which can feel like a punishment for being a victim ^[6]. Tell the school if another pupil is involved, and for threats, sexual content or hate-targeted abuse it is reasonable to involve the police. The aim throughout is to keep the lines of communication open so your child keeps telling you.

How common is bullying?

Bullying is one of the most common difficulties of childhood. If your child is being bullied, they aren't alone, this isn't rare, and it isn't a reflection of something unusual or wrong about them.

Around the world the picture is similar, with roughly one in four children experiencing bullying as a victim ^[7]. The point for parents is simple: this is a widespread problem, and one that schools have a clear responsibility to address.

Who gets bullied, and why it's never their fault

Any child can be bullied. It's worth saying clearly, because both parents and children often quietly search for a reason in the bullied child themselves. There's no quality in a child that makes bullying acceptable or deserved.

It's true that some groups of children are targeted more often. Children with special educational needs or a disability are bullied more often than their peers, and autistic children are among the most affected of all ^[1]. LGBT+ young people are bullied at roughly double the rate of their classmates ^[8]. Appearance is the single most common trigger that bullied children themselves point to ^[9]. But every one of these is a fact about the behaviour of those who bully, not a flaw in the children who are bullied. The response is never to ask a child to change who they are, or to hide it. It's to address the bullying.

This matters because bullied children very commonly conclude that the bullying is their fault, or that there's something wrong with them. Hearing clearly and repeatedly from the adults around them that this isn't true is one of the most important things a bullied child can receive.

Signs your child may be being bullied

Many children don't tell their parents they're being bullied. They may feel ashamed, fear it will make things worse, worry about disappointing you, or believe nothing can be done. So it often shows up in other ways:

• Reluctance or refusal to go to school, or wanting to be driven rather than walk or take the bus.
• Physical complaints, such as stomach aches and headaches, especially on school mornings.
• Becoming withdrawn, anxious, tearful or unusually irritable.
• Trouble sleeping, nightmares, or a change in appetite.
• Unexplained cuts, bruises, or lost and damaged belongings.
• A drop in grades, concentration or interest in things they used to enjoy.
• Asking for or stealing money, which can be a sign of a child being extorted.

No single sign proves bullying, but a cluster of changes, especially around school, is worth taking seriously and asking about gently.

The impact of bullying on mental health

Bullying isn't something most children simply shrug off. It's consistently linked to anxiety, low mood, low self-esteem, self-harm and, in the most serious cases, suicidal thoughts. The link with depression is strong: a large review found that bullied children were close to three times more likely to experience depression than children who weren't bullied ^[10].

There's also good evidence that bullying doesn't merely sit alongside these difficulties but actively contributes to them. A large study of twins, designed to separate the effect of bullying from a child's pre-existing make-up, found that being bullied made a direct contribution to anxiety and depression ^[11]. Part of how it does this is by teaching a child that other people can't be trusted, a sense of distrust that itself predicts later mental health problems ^[12]. This is worth knowing, because it explains why rebuilding a child's trust and sense of safety is such a central part of recovery.

How bullying affects school, friendships and the future

Parents often worry less about how common bullying is and more about what it's doing to their child here and now, and further down the line. The answer from the research is that the effects are real and reach into several areas of life. Reassuringly, much of the harm runs through the distress bullying causes, which is exactly what support can ease.

School and grades

Bullying makes it harder to learn. Across large international studies, bullied children score lower in core subjects and are more likely to fall behind ^[13]. Crucially, that link runs largely through the emotional difficulties bullying creates, rather than through ability, so a child whose distress is addressed is far better placed to recover their footing at school ^[14].

Getting to school at all

For many children, the most visible effect is on attendance. The dread of facing the place where the bullying happens can show up as school refusal, or as headaches and stomach aches on school mornings, and online bullying roughly doubles the likelihood of a child missing school out of fear ^[15]. If this is your situation, our guide to school anxiety and emotionally-based school avoidance goes into much more depth.

Friendships and trust

Bullying can leave a child wary of other people, slower to trust, and more likely to expect the worst of their peers. That guardedness is understandable, but left unaddressed it can outlast the bullying itself and make new friendships harder, which is one reason rebuilding trust is a focus of counselling.

The longer term

The effects of bullying can last a long time. Following a large group of British children into midlife, researchers found that those who had been frequently bullied still had raised rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts at the age of 45, decades after the bullying itself ^[16].

The reach can be practical as well as emotional. The same British cohorts find that adults who were frequently bullied as children are, on average, less likely to be in work and tend to have lower earnings decades later ^[17], and a UK study following young people to age 25 linked bullying to worse exam and degree outcomes and lower income ^[18].

Two things make this less frightening than it first sounds. First, these are raised risks across large groups, not a fixed fate for any one child. Second, the effect is strongest when bullying is frequent and goes unaddressed, which is precisely why noticing it, believing your child, and getting support early makes such a difference. It's also worth knowing that, in careful research, being bullied by peers has been linked to worse long-term mental health than being mistreated by adults, a finding that should put to rest the idea that bullying is a harmless part of growing up.

A note on the child who bullies

It can help to know that children who bully are often struggling themselves, with their own difficulties at home, with friendships, or with managing strong feelings. This is an explanation, not an excuse, and it doesn't lessen your responsibility to protect your own child. But it can make the situation easier to think about clearly, and it's a reminder that schools addressing bullying well support every child involved, not only the target. Children who are both bullied and bully others, sometimes called bully-victims, tend to have the hardest time of all, with the highest rates of later difficulty, which is part of why a good school response looks at the whole picture rather than only handing out a punishment.

Bullying between siblings

Bullying does not only happen at school. Bullying between brothers and sisters is common and easy to dismiss as ordinary squabbling, but when it is repeated, one-sided and meant to hurt, it is bullying, and it carries real risks for a child's mental health in its own right ^[20]. The same principles apply at home as at school: name it calmly, make clear it is not acceptable, protect the child being targeted, and resist treating it as two children who simply need to get along.

What it's like for parents

It's worth naming how hard this is for you, too. Parents of bullied children often carry anger, helplessness, guilt and exhaustion, and many lose sleep over it. You may also be managing a drawn-out and frustrating process with a school that's slow to act. Looking after yourself, leaning on other adults you trust, and pacing the fight are all part of being able to keep showing up for your child.

What to say and what not to say

When a child tells you they're being bullied, your first response matters. A few things help:

• Believe them, and say so. "I believe you, and I'm glad you told me" is a powerful start.
• Make it clear it isn't their fault. Say it more than once, because they may not take it in the first time.
• Stay calm on the outside. Big adult anger, even on their behalf, can frighten a child into saying less.
• Ask what they want to happen. A child who fears you will "make it worse" needs to feel some control over the next step.

Try to avoid "just ignore it", "stand up to them", or anything that implies they brought it on themselves. These are common reflexes, but they can leave a child feeling more alone.

What you can do as a parent

Beyond talking with school, the home you provide is itself one of the most powerful protections your child has. This isn't a platitude. In a study of identical twins, the children who received more warmth at home coped measurably better with bullying than their genetically identical siblings who received less, which means the warmth itself, not something inherited, was doing the protecting ^[21].

In practice that means keeping home a place where your child feels liked, listened to and safe, protecting the routines and relationships that steady them, and staying connected even when they're withdrawn. Alongside that, keep a calm record of incidents, raise it with school in writing and ask about their anti-bullying policy, and escalate if the response falls short. Warmth at home and persistence with school aren't alternatives; together they're the strongest thing you can offer.

What your child's school must do, and how to make them act

Schools are not just morally expected to deal with bullying; they are legally required to. By law, under the Education and Inspections Act 2006, every state school in England must have a behaviour policy that includes measures to prevent all forms of bullying among pupils, and it must be shared with pupils, staff and parents ^[2]. Academies and independent schools have an equivalent duty to put an effective anti-bullying strategy in place. You are entitled to ask for that policy and read it. The legal duties and the escalation route described here apply in England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own arrangements, though the principle that schools must act is the same.

There is a second layer of protection. Under the Equality Act 2010, bullying that targets a child for a protected characteristic, their disability, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or being trans, can amount to unlawful discrimination rather than only a behaviour matter, and schools have a positive duty to tackle it ^[2]. If you are worried that your child is at risk of harm, you can raise it directly with the school's designated safeguarding lead, or with your local authority's children's services. It then becomes a safeguarding issue, and the school's designated safeguarding lead should be involved.

In practice, the things that move a school to respond are unglamorous but effective. Keep a dated written record of every incident: what happened, when, who was involved and what you reported. Raise it with the class teacher or head of year, and put it in writing so there is a clear trail. Ask what the anti-bullying policy says will happen, and by when.

If the response falls short, there is a clear ladder to climb. After the teacher and headteacher, make a formal complaint to the governing body or, for an academy, the board of trustees, following the school's published complaints procedure. If that doesn't resolve it, you can complain to the Department for Education, which handles unresolved complaints about state schools, academies included, once the school's own procedure has been followed. You can also raise concerns with Ofsted, which can consider written complaints about how a school as a whole handles bullying once you have exhausted its own process, though it won't resolve an individual case. Persistence, calmly documented, is one of the most powerful things a parent brings.

What actually reduces bullying

It's worth knowing what the evidence says works, because it shapes what to ask your school for. Whole-school anti-bullying programmes, the kind that involve all the staff, parents, have a clear policy and offer consistent responses, do reduce bullying, by roughly 15 to 20% across a large body of trials ^[23]. They work best when the school owns the problem rather than handing it to the children to sort out among themselves; poorly designed peer schemes can sometimes make things worse.

There is an important limit, though. Those same programmes do very little to ease the anxiety and low mood of a child who has already been bullied ^[24]. Preventing bullying across a school and helping one hurt child recover are two different jobs, which is exactly why individual support for your child sits alongside, not inside, whatever the school is doing.

One finding is worth holding onto. When another child steps in during bullying, it usually stops quickly, within ten seconds more than half the time. The trouble is that other children are present for the great majority of bullying but step in only about one time in five ^[25]. Helping children understand that telling an adult, or quietly supporting a targeted friend, is the opposite of weakness is part of how the culture around a child shifts.

When to seek professional help

It's worth seeking professional support if the bullying has led to ongoing anxiety, low mood, sleep problems, school refusal, or a clear drop in your child's confidence that isn't lifting, even if the bullying itself has stopped. If you are worried about your child's safety at any point, contact your GP urgently or call NHS 111, and call 999 or go to A&E if it feels more urgent than that. A good first step is to speak to your GP or a trusted member of school staff, and to consider specialist counselling for your child.

How counselling helps

Counselling gives a bullied child something they often can't get anywhere else: a safe, confidential space with a trained adult whose only job is to help them. There, a child can talk about what happened, including feelings they may hide from you to protect you, begin to untangle the self-blame, and slowly rebuild their sense of worth and their trust in other people. A UK evaluation of school-based counselling found it brought real improvement for pupils who had been bullied ^[26].

There's no single bullying therapy, and that isn't a gap so much as a reflection of how individual recovery is ^[27]. A good counsellor assesses your child and draws on whichever approach fits them. For one child that might be person-centred work that rebuilds confidence through a trusting relationship ^[28]; for another, cognitive behavioural techniques to loosen anxious or self-critical thinking ^[29]; for a younger child, creative and play-based work; and where bullying has left trauma, a trauma-focused approach. What matters more than the label is the relationship: across therapies, the bond between a young person and their counsellor is one of the most consistent predictors of whether therapy helps ^[30]. That's why we match a child to the right person, not the nearest available appointment.

A clinical perspective from one of our counsellors

Helen Spiers, MBACP (Accred), Head of Counselling at Finding Therapy, shares how she works in her sessions:

"I was a teacher for fifteen years before I retrained as a counsellor, and I’ve also worked as a school counsellor too. Between them, those years taught me how much a child can already be carrying by the time an adult thinks to ask, and how hard it is for a parent who’s trying to get something done about it."

"A child who has been bullied often arrives braced for more questions about it, so in the early sessions we talk about almost anything else. They need to find out that I’m safe before they’ll risk telling me what actually happened, and that can take a few weeks rather than a few minutes. When it does come, it usually arrives in something small, a detail about a lunchtime or a group chat. I’m not in a hurry, because being allowed to go slowly is often what reassures them that counselling is safe."

"Much of the work after that is about giving a child back some say. Being bullied is a long stretch of things being done to you with no control over any of it, so in our sessions they decide what we talk about and what we leave alone. If they want to spend a session on something else entirely, that is a good use of the time rather than avoidance. I don’t ask a child to tell the whole story again for my benefit. Most of them have told it several times already, to adults who couldn’t make it stop, and being asked to repeat it can feel like one more thing to get through."

"When I was a school counsellor it was very clear that children found it hard to open up in the place where the bullying was happening. Sometimes a child would come to me from a lesson with the people involved, say very little, and walk straight back out into the same corridor. My work online has been more successful. They’re somewhere they feel safe and there’s no one to run into afterwards."

"What I would want a parent to know is that children do come back from this. The signs things are getting back to normal are rarely dramatic. It usually shows up as a child who argues with their sibling again, or mentions someone from school without flinching, or asks to go somewhere at the weekend. Those signs tend to arrive before a child is able to say out loud that they feel better."

Why online therapy can suit this work

Online counselling widens the pool, so a child can be matched to a counsellor who genuinely specialises in their needs rather than whoever happens to be local. For anxiety and depression in children and young people, therapy delivered through a screen has been found to work about as well as meeting in person ^[31], and for many young people the familiarity of a screen makes it easier, not harder, to open up. That research was not about bullying specifically, so treat it as general reassurance about online therapy for young people rather than proof for this.

Recovery: what it actually looks like

Recovery from bullying is real, and it's the rule rather than the exception. It rarely looks like a single moment when everything is fine again. More often it's a gradual return of confidence, of trust in friends, and of interest in the things a child set aside. Some children feel noticeably better within a few weeks once the bullying is properly addressed and they feel believed and safe; others need longer to rebuild. Encouragingly, the research on bullying's effects also shows that they can fade over time, especially for children who feel supported, which is a reminder of how much resilience young people have when the adults around them get it right ^[11].

A final word

If your child is being bullied, the most useful things to hold onto are these: it isn't their fault, and it can be addressed. Bullying is a widespread and serious problem, but it's one that schools have a legal duty to act on and that children genuinely recover from.

At Finding Therapy, our counsellors are experienced in supporting children and young people through bullying and its effects, whether the bullying is ongoing or its impact has outlasted it. You can look through our counselling directory and find someone who you think would be a good fit, or if you’re not sure, give us a call and we’ll give you some advice. There’s no waiting list so we can make a start straight away.