Massachusetts Faces Calls To Beef Up Anti-Bullying Law

A 14-year-old boy who committed suicide after being subjected to persistent bullying in school has anti-bullying advocates calling on Massachusetts to take a tougher stance. Jason Bernard's death in 2025 has given rise to conversations about the state's “An Act Relative to Bullying in Schools” in 2010 to stop bullying abuse.

Despite the measure — once heralded as one of the nation's best laws to combat school bullying — the problem is still escalating among students, particularly online, and is still often ignored in Massachusetts, according to the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.

Today, families, advocates, and lawyers are pressing for stronger protections, faster investigations, real-time staff training, culturally competent responses, multilingual access, and local initiatives such as Peabody PROMISE and Jason's Legacy Foundation to raise awareness of and fight bullying.

The statistics surrounding bullying leave much concern: According to the most current data from the Massachusetts Youth Health Survey of sixth through eighth graders, more than 41% of middle schoolers reported being bullied at school in 2023. That's an increase from the 35% who said they were subjected to bullying four years before.

GBH News found that more than 800 parents or caregivers — fed up with how their local schools were handling bullying issues — filed complaints with a state program called the Problem Resolution System over the last three years.

Further, a Northeastern University School of Law report highlights gaps and disparities in investigations affecting students of color and those with disabilities.

Pediatric neurologists, psychologists, and educators warn that bullying causes deep psychological harm — depression, anxiety, and potential PTSD — and call for tighter enforcement, broader definitions that capture power dynamics, and improved victim outreach.

Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights, said that bullying has been further driven by an increasingly divisive political climate in the United States.

“If schools were taking it seriously, we wouldn't be seeing a slave auction in a school where a Black student is being bid on by white classmates,'' said Espinoza-Madrigal to GBH News. “We wouldn't be seeing scenes like the recreation of George Floyd's murder with a Black kid on the ground, with a white student putting their knee on the Black kid's neck and yelling out, ‘George Floyd! George Floyd!'”