Senator Win Gatchalian has sounded the alarm on the unreported cases of bullying in schools in the country.
Gatchalian expressed his concerns to the Department of Education (DepEd) now led by Vice President Sara Duterte, seeking efforts to improve reporting bullying cases in schools.
The senator said he merely wants the DepEd to improve its mechanisms for the reporting of bullying cases, although he was careful to directly call out the Vice President in his press statement on Wednesday, February 15.
Gatchalian pointed to the discrepancies in the DepEd’s data, and the findings of international large-scale assessments which points to a large number of unreported cases.
The Senate has reviewed the implementation of the Anti-Bullying Act of 2013 (Republic Act No. 10627), where DepEd reported that bullying cases have been on the rise since School Year (SY) 2014-2015, when there were 5,624 cases reported.
There were 21,521 cases reported in SY 2018-2019, the highest number of cases for the past years. The number dropped to 11,637 for SY 2019-2020 possibly due to the shift to distance learning from face-to-face classes.
Gatchalian cited the results of the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) when the Philippines got the highest percentage of 15-year-old learners, out of 79 countries, who reported experiencing bullying at least a few times a month. Based on the study’s results, 65 percent of learners reported experiencing being bullied.
The 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) also revealed that 62.5% of the country’s Grade 5 learners reported experiencing bullying. Compared to other Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines’ Grade 5 learners are the most exposed to bullying.
“If you look at PISA and SEA-PLM figures, we’re talking about more than 60 percent, 11,000 is not even one percent of the total student population, so merong discrepancy. If you look at DepEd’s numbers, ang layo. What the large-scale examinations are saying is that it’s up to 65%, so if we convert that to the student population we’re talking about up to 17.5 million students as opposed to 11,000, so how do we reconcile that?” Gatchalian said.
“The first order of business is to improve mechanisms for reporting because there are many students who are not reporting, who are scared of reporting and we can see that there’s a disparity between what is being gathered in large-scale international assessments and what’s on the ground, and that leads me to a conclusion that our units on the ground are not functioning,” he added.
