Beating the Bullies full transcript

Reporter: Rahni Sadler
Producer: Nick Farrow

RAHNI SADLER: How much freedom and enjoyment do you get from hand cycling?

Melissa Leckie: A lot, it’s incredible. It’s just like being able to go for a run again. It’s my escape.

RAHNI SADLER: Melissa Leckie’s an Australian Paralympian, about as tough as they come and she’s had to be.

Melissa Leckie: : Even when I was five I was a lot shorter than all of the other girls I had big eighties glasses and of course physical appearance is the thing. Everyone makes judgements when they see someone. I was relatively bright and then I was a nerd because I was in the chess team. I played chess, I liked maths. I loved science.

RAHNI SADLER: From the day she started school to the day she left, Mel was bullied.

Melissa Leckie: I remember in year five. I was very excited because I had a birthday invitation sent to me house for a party at the Ice Arena one night and it was going to be a sleepover. And mum found out it was a fake. And that the girls thought it would be funny to see me rock up with a pillow and a present and just sit there and look stupid.

RAHNI SADLER: At 15, Mel changed schools from an all girls to a co-ed.

Melissa Leckie: There I got more physical bullying from the boys as opposed to all, of the covert, behind your back from the girls at my previous school.

RAHNI SADLERL She was a talented gymnast and diver.

Mel was also about as lonely and isolated as a girl could ever be.

Melissa Leckie: I’d get my bags stolen or my books left out in the middle of the oval. They broke into my locker I got pushed off benches got a football kicked at my head and this one boy and his cronies would pretend to throw up on me every time I walked past or if they weren’t trying to throw up they’d be screaming out ‘slut’ and it got too much.

RAHNI SADLER: She told her teachers and school counsellors but the bullying didn’t stop.

On the 12th June 2001, she retuned to her old school, went to a third floor balcony and jumped.

Melissa Leckie: Being the gymnast that I am, I, rather than just doing a swan dive I thought I could see how many somersaults I could do on the way down, thought I’d go out with style and landed flat on my back. I think I did three and a half and severed my spinal chord from my belly button down, which left me paralysed and in a wheelchair.

RAHNI SADLER: Bullying has never been more of a serious issue than it is now.

Kate Miller-Heidke wrote the song that’s becoming an anthem for bullied kids.

In ‘Caught in the Crowd’ she sings about how sorry she is for not helping someone being victimised.

One in four Australian schoolkids is bullied repeatedly. Now put that into perspective, with a crowd like this there are 13,000 people here, that means 3000 of them are probably now reliving bad memories.

Dina Halkic: Allem was a beautiful, beautiful child.

Ali Halkic: People just wanted to be around him all the time. He wanted to be around people as well.

Dina Halkic: He was such a young, confident teenager.

RAHNI SADLER: You say it all turned around in three weeks?

Ali Halkic: Yeah in three weeks.

RAHNI SADLER: Allem Halkic was Ali and Dina’s only child. A popular seventeen-year-old who dreamed of being a chef. But in January last year he got into an argument online with a former friend. It triggered weeks of relentless cyber bullying.

Ali Halkic: What was said to him, the extent to the threats, we don’t know to tell you the truth. We know that communication was done and they got into his mind, broke his heart, shattered him.

Dina Halkic: From midnight until two in the morning, that’s when everything happened and he was getting the worst phone calls and text messages.

RAHNI SADLER: Sometime before dawn on the 5th February last year, Allem left home, went to Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge and jumped.

Dina woke early to find her son missing, she called the police.

Dina Halkic: The police came within the hour and I just ran to the front door and said it’s my son, you’ve got to find him, don’t even come in, just take this photo and just start looking for him. And they just said come inside and the moment he said it, it’s like on TV, its’ like your worst thing that could ever happen to you, like exactly on TV. When the police tell you to come inside the house and sit down you just know that something good is not going to come out of this. As soon as he said the words I’m sorry I just collapsed, I just, I don’t remember anything after that, I really don’t.

RAHNI SADLER: Only later did they find out Allem had endured death threats and abuse via phone calls, texts and the internet.

Dina Halkic: I saw one text message that said he was really going to really cop it. I won’t use the language that was on it that they were going to get through to his friends and turn his friends against him and Allan lived for his friends.

Ali Halkic: Where we failed as parents Rahni is that we bought these tools in and they’re great tools for educationals and all these types of things but when they’re used in the wrong ways they’re so dangerous. We didn’t understand that.

Carrie Herbert: With your own personal mobile phone, which most young children have you are reachable 24 hours a day, which means at three o’clock in the morning, a group of children can actually all get together and send an extremely devastating text saying we’re going to get you, you’re not worth living.

RAHNI SADLER: Carrie Herbert is a former Adelaide teacher who’s pioneered a way of rescuing these kids. Special schools in the UK called Red Balloons, refuges for children who the education system has failed.

Here, vulnerable children can escape the tormenters who can push them to the brink.

Carrie Herbert: Once we have got them safe and we start protecting them and teaching them skills and strategies of dealing with it next time it happens.

RAHNI SADLER: Students are taught a range of techniques to deflect bullies. Confidence and trust are painstakingly restored. The aim is to get kids back into regular schools.
Hamish: My first day when I came here, I loved it, it was brilliant.

RAHNI SADLER: From the moment you walked in the door?

Hamish: Yeah.

RAHNI SADLER: Ostracised, attacked verbally and physically, Hamish spent months in a psychiatric hospital before he made it here.

RAHNI SADLER: Did you ever think about ending it all?

Hamish: Well it was a thought in the back of my head but since I’ve come here, I’ve, that thought has just gone. I wouldn’t waste my life now I’ve come here.

Carrier Herbert: Fifty percent of the children we have at Red Balloon have seriously considered or have attempted suicide so it’s literally about stabilising them, giving them something to live for.

RAHNI SADLER: And if we don’t get something like this?

Carrie Herbert: You will continue to have children who kill themselves.

RAHNI SADLER: For many bullied kids, what’s so hard is seeing friends or classmates doing nothing to help.

Though that’s the way the song goes, Kate wasn’t the bystander who watched someone being bullied.

She was the victim repeatedly attacked in a schoolyard by another girl. Then one day the girl sent a note asking Kate to meet her in the schoolyard.

Kate Miller-Heidke: I thought maybe she’s going to apologise and we can be firiends now and I went there and it was her surrounded by all her friends and she goes hey I’ve got something for you Kate and she just pretty much bought out her fist and just punched me as hard as she could.

RAHNI SADLER: The bully was suspended.

But for Kate that wasn’t the end of it.

Kate Miller-Heidke: I think the worst the worst thing about that wasn’t being hit in the face it was the fact that after that all my friends and people I thought were my friends kind of took sides and for some reason they all sided with her maybe cause she had such an intimidating presence and she was really popular and I wasn’t.

RAHNI SADLER: And for Mel?

Melissa Leckie: There were lot of bystanders. Um I know there’s been a lot more responsibility put o the bystanders recently and I think that’s very fair. If you can see it happening and you can see what it’s doing to the person, you know it’s just as much your responsibility to go and report it.

RAHNI SADLER: What were you able to go and find inside yourself to redirect your life?

Melissa Leckie: My wheels, I got my life back. Slowly but surely I’m still learning things and pushing boundaries every day.

RAHNI SADLER: It’s now 13 months since Allem died.

Dina Halkic: What’s happened to us is the worst tragedy anyone can ever experience, we’ve got nothing now.

Ali Halkic: He was our life, he was our purpose of existence and they took that.

RAHNI SADLER: Ali and Dina are now pushing for new laws and penalties for cyber bullying in memory of the son they’ve lost.

Ali Halkic: There’s nothing you can do in your life that you don’t think of him you know- walk, put your shoes on, get dressed you know he’s in there, he’s in your mind consistently. In one shape and form it’s beautiful but the other side of it is such a hard punishment, it’s just so painful.

Dina Halkic: But you have to keep going and you have to keep going for him. I want him to be proud of what we’ve achieved and what we continue to do, it’s all for him.