Bullying in Malaysian schools isn’t just a sad statistic or a scandalous news clip; it is a deadly pressure cooker that too often ends where hope ends—at the edge of a child’s life. We’ve heard the heartbreaking stories, watched the rash of tragedies unfold, and still we hesitate to admit the obvious: this is not a private grievance to muzzle, it’s a public crisis we are failing to treat with the urgency it deserves. Silence, as always, is a kind of permission. And in this tense silence, died too many bright, scared kids who believed they were alone in a fortress of taunts. The root causes are not mysterious. They are a toxic mix of power imbalances, social-media mobs, and a schooling culture that too often rewards toughness over empathy. We normalize cruelty as “growing up,” we shrug at cruelty in the name of discipline, and we tell kids to “toughen up” while offering them nothing substantial to help cope with the pain. This has to stop. The buck stops with us—the society that witness...