Let's Stop Bullying campaign launches: what can ECEC learn about prevention before school?

The Australian Government has launched a 10 million dollar national campaign responding to the 2025 Anti-Bullying Rapid Review, which found more than one in four students in Years 4 to 9 report experiencing bullying regularly and 53 percent of young people have experienced cyberbullying. The Review documented a 455 percent increase in cyberbullying reports to the eSafety Commissioner over five years and identified emerging technologies creating new forms of harmful behaviour including deepfakes, AI-generated content and image-based abuse. The campaign centres on the LetsStopBullying.gov.au website providing free expert-developed resources for school-aged children, parents and carers, with additional resources for the school workforce expected ahead of the 2027 school year.

Real-time detection closes the operational gap this campaign addresses. Guardii deploys AI-driven pattern recognition to intercept cyberbullying, image-based abuse and AI-generated harmful content before it reaches a target, identifying sustained targeting, escalation and coercion in direct-message conversations across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms. Where awareness campaigns aim to equip communities to recognise harm after the fact, Guardii surfaces children in crisis to parents, schools or professionals at the point of contact, blocking hostile messages and enabling rapid escalation to authorities in an emergency without requiring anyone to read every message. The platform flags the shape and seriousness of a conversation rather than handing stakeholders a feed of content, addressing the technology-enabled harms the Review documented through targeted detection rather than retrospective reporting.