CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Obyrne, Aifric Padraigin |
|---|---|
| Title | ANTI-BULLYING STRATEGIES: IS A LEGISLATIVE APPROACH THE BEST SOLUTION? |
| Summary | This thesis will compare a number of different approaches that have emerged in recent years in response to the problem of bullying in schools. In this manner, it will compare the legisla-tive and policy-based strategies imposed by the jurisdictions of New Jersey, British Columbia, and Ireland, to see how they measure against the hypothesis of this thesis: A legislative anti-bullying model is preferable to a policy approach as it is more capable of preventing school bullying. Furthermore, that a legislative approach will more effectively balance all the co-existing human rights involved in school bullying, due to the multitude of legal considerations that would underpin the creation of such laws. In addressing the issue of bullying, this thesis will adopt a human rights-based perspective, and assess the advantages of phrasing bullying as a violation of such. It will analyse the hu-man rights most affected by the problem of bullying, and draw out the key rights shared by both victim and bully, which must be acknowledged and protected by any successful anti-bullying strategy. These rights are the following: • The right of education. • The right to freedom for torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. • The right to development. • The right to respect for private and family life. Based upon this research, this thesis will develop a set of four questions against which to measure the benefits and drawbacks of the three jurisdictions forming the basis of the com-parison of this thesis. These questions are the following: 1. Are there effective procedures in place for protecting victims and preventing bully-ing? 2. How do these approaches deal with the rights of all students to develop in a safe and inclusive school environment? 3. Are schools in the jurisdictions capable of dealing with cyberbullying? 4. How may one rely on such structures in order to invoke their human rights and bring a bullying case before the law? This thesis will continue by introducing the anti-bullying approaches in existence in jurisdic-tions of New Jersey, British Columbia, and Ireland. It will lay out the background context in each of the jurisdictions underpinning the creation of the individual approaches, and the par-ticular features of each model. The jurisdictions will then be measures against the aforemen-tioned questions. A thorough analysis of such will reveal that the hypothesis of this thesis; that a legislative anti-bullying approach is preferable to a policy based approach, has not been proven. It will furthermore discover that the second limb of the hypothesis; that a legislative approach can more effectively balance all the co-existing human rights involved in school bullying, has similarly not been proven by the jurisdictions that have informed this thesis. However, a number of conclusions can be drawn from the comparison through the application of the aforementioned questions, which may address a number of real life problems which jurisdictions may face in the choice an application of a modern, successful, anti-bullying strategy. |
| Supervisor | Uitz, Renata & Polgari, Eszter |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/obyrne_aifric.pdf |
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