Victoria's Department of Education announced on 12 August 2026 that 200 primary and secondary schools will participate in a peer-led Let's Stop Bullying ambassadors program beginning in Term 4, training students to recognise early signs of bullying and cyberbullying and to support peers in reporting incidents to teachers and welfare staff. The initiative forms part of the state's implementation of the updated National Anti-Bullying Framework and will see over 1,200 student ambassadors trained by the Alannah and Madeline Foundation in bystander intervention, digital citizenship and trauma-aware peer support. The program responds to evidence in the Anti-Bullying Rapid Review that students are more likely to disclose online harassment to a trusted peer than to an adult, particularly when incidents involve image-based abuse or sextortion.
Peer support lowers the barrier to disclosure and can surface harm that would otherwise remain hidden, but the disclosure itself still occurs after the child has been exposed and often after the abuse has escalated over days or weeks. Guardii's anti-sextortion and anti-cyberbullying detection modules operate at the point of first contact, analysing incoming direct messages in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms and blocking or flagging threats before they reach the child, surfacing acute distress or suicide-risk signals to a parent or school professional immediately. By detecting threat patterns rather than relying on a student to recognise, process and report harm through a peer or adult intermediary, the system closes the time gap that peer ambassador programs are designed to shorten but cannot eliminate, enabling the rapid escalation that both frameworks depend upon.
