Victoria updates school bullying policy in line with national framework changes

The Victorian Department of Education has committed to aligning its school bullying and cyberbullying policies with the revised National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children by the end of 2026, following the release of the federal Anti-Bullying Rapid Review. The updated Victorian policy will require all government and Catholic schools to adopt a common definition of cyberbullying that includes image-based abuse and AI-generated explicit content targeting students, and will expand the remit of the department's existing Student Safety and Wellbeing division to provide 24/7 triage support for serious incidents. Victoria recorded 1,247 formal cyberbullying complaints in state schools during the 2025 academic year, with principals reporting that the complexity of cases—particularly those involving manipulated images and cross-platform harassment—has increased significantly.

The complexity principals describe stems from behaviour that unfolds across multiple apps and escalates over hours or days, not from isolated messages that arrive during school hours. Detection systems that analyse conversational context and identify coercion, sexual solicitation or sustained targeting as it develops deliver intervention points that a single-platform complaint mechanism or after-hours triage service cannot replicate. Anti-grooming and anti-CSAM detection that operates within Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox direct messages intercepts the distribution of manipulated or AI-generated explicit imagery and the escalation patterns characteristic of sextortion before a formal complaint is filed, surfacing the threat to a parent or school professional in real time and enabling immediate escalation to law enforcement when the conversation meets criminal thresholds, addressing the cross-platform complexity that overwhelms retrospective reporting workflows.