Last week, I looked back on my successes of the past year, but afterwards, I thought rather sadly, that many teens find it difficult to succeed because they’re being bullied.

I expect there were quite a lot who didn’t want to return to school or college recently because they’d been bullied. It’s an awful and complex issue.

You could define bullying as a deliberate act intended to cause pain and upset, but then, some people don’t even understand that they’re bullies.

Then, there are different types of bullying. It can be hands on, messing with people’s minds or increasingly, sometimes done using technology like mobile phones or internet chat rooms and websites.

Whatever the case, it’s unacceptable. It wrecks lives and stifles talent, and those of us who can, must make the effort to stop it and reduce the harm it causes.

My college has a zero tolerance policy towards bullying which is all good and well but that hasn’t put a stop to the bullying, because some people don’t speak up.

There are different sorts of support available for anyone who feels bullied, they have options. That’s really important because in many cases the effects of bullying are massively exaggerated by the imagination, but being able to even just talk to somebody who will at the very least, listen sympathetically, is a big relief in itself.

Suffering in silence or hiding somewhere safe isn’t the way to deal with the problem.

Every educational establishment has some form of bullies or bullying whether they like it or not so they should have an anti-bullying policy and if that’s not enough to make suffers come forward then there are other avenues of support like Child line, the Samaritans, or the police.

So called “Cyber Bullies” leave themselves wide open to criminal prosecution because the messages they produce can be retrieved and used as evidence against them.

Bullying is a vicious blight in society. We all share the responsibility for stopping it, but we can’t help people who won’t tell us, we’re not all mind readers you know.