Thesis (M. A.) --University of Limpopo, 2019. / Bullying seems to be prevalent in most secondary schools, and teachers have a daily task of dealing with it. In South Africa, there are many issues which influence teachers’ management of bullying, such as community violence and parental attitudes. Teachers’ abilities to identify and respond to incidents of bullying, and their knowledge of bullying behaviour can have an impact on anti-bullying strategies. Secondary school management as well as parents have a responsibility towards efforts to eliminate bullying in schools. Failure to reduce bullying in secondary schools would result in high failure rates and poor concentration on school work among learners. This study aimed to describe teachers’ perspectives on learner bullying at Schools A and B. This study used Albert Bandura’s (1977) Social Learning Theory which offers a theoretical framework that helped the researcher find meaning in respect of the roles of the bully, victim and offenders. The study followed a qualitative approach, using focus group sessions to collect data in order to explore teachers’ experiences of bullying. The qualitative data were analysed by means of thematic analysis to present the collected data. The responses were recorded in the form of writing. The data was thoroughly structured into themes. Information obtained from respondents was treated with great confidentiality. Purposive and availability sampling were used to identify potential respondents who were asked to volunteer to be part of the study. The research findings specified that teachers experience and observe a wide variety of bullying behaviour which takes place at different sites, both inside and outside the school grounds. Moreover, the teachers conveyed numerous factors which they experienced as pertaining to bullying and emphasised the perceived effects. In addition to this, the participants shared knowledge about their teaching practices and recommended a few approaches on how to deal with bullying more effectively in their schools.

The focus of this study was to ascertain what, if any, were the commonalities and differences between and among bully-suicide victims between the ages of nine and eighteen. The focus of this study additionally was to determine to what extent, if any, was there a relationship between parent advocacy, media coverage, and/or a social event related to bully-suicide and the implementation or amending of state anti-bullying legislation. Bully-suicide victims (N = 92) from throughout the United States whose information was available through Internet search engines were included in this study. Further, state legislators (N = 50) who sponsored their states most recent anti-bullying legislation also were included. State legislators who provided direct responses to the request to participate answered four interview questions regarding their sponsorship of anti-bullying legislation. Commonalities between bully-suicide victims were analyzed to determine if particular demographics had an equal likelihood of occurrence. Legislator responses to the interview questions were analyzed for themes using a phenomenological research method. Through an examination of the research results and related literature, the researcher determined that there was a statistically significant deviation from equal likelihood of groups for bully-suicide victims who were male, high school-aged, or targeted due to appearance or sexual orientation. Further, bully-suicide victims were most frequently subjected to verbal bullying. Evaluation of the data also unveiled that parent advocacy, media coverage and social events related to bully-suicide were related to state legislator sponsorship of anti-bullying legislation