In a story that was reported this past Friday, December 13, South Carolina lawmakers proposed a new bill that would permit students to report bullying anonymously through each individual school district's website.
Granted, this is only one step, and there needs to be a great deal more included in this proposition to make it more robust and effective, but it certainly seems like a step in the right direction.
Here's why:
At the risk of stating the obvious, this concept - the ability to report the bullying anonymously - helps, at least in theory, address one of the biggest hurdles in stemming bullying: the reluctance of victims or witnesses to come forward. Of course, this proposal may leave open the potential for abuse of the system, in the same way of false alarms. But, at least for now, it certainly seems that the pendulum is decidedly on the end of under-reporting rather than over-reporting,
