A first-grader who pushed a classmate off a stage, causing injury, did not commit school bullying, South Korea's Supreme Court has ruled. The court said such cases must be judged by weighing the student's age and cognitive capacity along with the severity of the act.
The Supreme Court's First Division, with Justice Chun Dae-yeop as the presiding judge, recently upheld a lower court ruling that dismissed a suit filed by the parents of a student identified as A against the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education's administrative appeals commission, legal sources said on the 20th. The suit had sought to overturn the commission's decision on a school bullying case.
In March 2023, a first-grader identified as B pushed classmate A off a stage in a multipurpose room at an elementary school in Gyeonggi Province during an after-school badminton class, causing injury. In February the following year, the school bullying deliberation committee at the Yongin Office of Education in Gyeonggi Province found that B's act constituted school bullying involving physical harm and asked the superintendent to order B to issue a written apology. The superintendent issued the order. B's side challenged it through an administrative appeal. In June that year, the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education's administrative appeals commission overturned the written apology order, saying the act was difficult to view as school bullying. A's side then filed suit asking the court to cancel that decision.
At issue was whether physical contact between elementary school students who were only 7 years old could be treated as school bullying under the School Violence Prevention Act.
The first trial court sided with A. It said it was unlawful to refuse even to recognize clear physical violence as school bullying based on a conclusion that the student who caused the harm was young and the case minor, making any measure unnecessary or excessive.
The appellate court reversed that finding. It said the circumstances in which the act occurred, the situation and the degree of the act must be examined carefully, and concluded it was difficult to find that B, only 7 at the time, needed to be guided through measures under the law or that the act rose to the level of being treated as school bullying.
The Supreme Court upheld the appellate ruling. Whether an act constitutes school bullying must be determined by comprehensively considering not only whether it fits the wording of the law but also the severity of the act, the circumstances of its occurrence, the surrounding context, and the need to protect the student harmed and to guide and educate the student who caused the harm, the court said. It added that treating every act accompanied by physical or mental harm as school bullying could unduly infringe on the human rights of the student who caused the harm, and found no error in the lower court's legal reasoning in ruling that B's act did not constitute school bullying.
A Supreme Court official said the ruling means that whether an act constitutes school bullying should not be judged solely by whether it matches the wording of the definition, but by considering the severity and circumstances of the act and the ages of the students involved.
