The survey of 1000 young people aged 14-25 also found that 23 per cent of respondents had been bullied in the past 12 months, but only half had sought help.

Bullying ranged from spreading rumours and name-calling to physical bullying, exclusion and cyber-bullying, and often involved a combination of behaviours, according to the online poll conducted by ReachOut Australia, a mental health organisation.

Parents are the most likely source of help for young people who experience bullying, followed by friends, doctors and teachers.

Fewer bullying victims turn to a phone helpline, online resources, youth and community centres or a religious leader.

"Some schools and teachers were able to intervene successfully; at other times, students felt that teachers were not very helpful," the study said.

ReachOut's chief executive Jono Nicholas said he was not surprised by the prevalence of bullying at school.

"What we need to be realistic about is any time or any place where large numbers of young people gather, you're likely to find a correlation with bullying," he said.

He added: "It's reasonable to expect that where you've got an environment where children and young people are trying to learn and renegotiate relationships, we shouldn't assume they're going to be brilliant at it at all times. That's the reality of human behaviour."

Isabel Henry discovered this dark reality when she began year 7 at St Columba's Catholic College in Springwood.

"Kids are really vicious," she said. "They just absolutely attack you any way they can."

For Ms Henry, it began with a mild insult from a fellow student that her involvement in a church youth group was "so lame".

The bullying soon escalated when her classmates began putting their school bags on seats so she had nowhere to sit.

"It kind of got worse from there," she said.

Ms Henry, now 20,said: "When it belittles you, it absolutely tears you apart."

Yet she did not seek help at school because "if you tell someone, you're a snitch". "It makes you worse off."

She sought help from her parents after she was tricked into going to a house to attend a party. Her father complained to the school principal, who handed out detentions and suspensions to the student bullies.

But that exacerbated the bullying "because I'd gotten them in trouble", Ms Henry said.

She eventually moved to another school.

Mr Nicholas said the challenge for schools, workplaces and online sites is to come up with ways to reduce the severity and likelihood of bullying.

A study of bullying released in 2016 by the University of South Australia found parents believed schools were failing children who were being bullied by taking no action or blaming the victims rather than punishing the bullies.

"Teachers mistakenly generally believe that students are most likely to come to them if bullied at school," said Ken Rigby, an adjunct professor in UniSA's school of education.

However, Mr Rigby said studies in several countries, including Australia, suggest there has been a slight decline in the prevalence of bullying in the past 20 years.

A new study authored by Mr Rigby, School perspectives on bullying and preventative strategies: An exploratory study, suggests anti-bullying policies are not adequately explained to students or parents at some schools.

But Ms Henry said stamping out child bullies was difficult. "They'll take any opportunity they can get no matter how many anti-bullying things you have in place," she said.

Cyberbullying is at the top of parents' minds as they send their teenage kids back to school this week, a study has shown.

Two in five Australian parents who participated in the study said that cyberbullying and bullying were their biggest concerns when sending their kids back to school.

Frankston High School student Danai Harawa said she thinks every parent worries about cyberbullying.

"They just don't expect it to happen to their child. They might not have that discussion with their children about how to deal with it or that it's okay to speak out," she told Fairfax Media.

The study, by Telstra in combination with Project Rockit, showed that despite parents' concerns, 21 per cent were unsure if their child had been a victim of cyberbullying.

Victorian parents were the least likely to know if their child was a victim. Parents in New South Wales were most likely to worry about their child's safety online.

Project Rockit co-founder Lucy Thomas said, "there is a gap between how young people and their parents see cyberbullying".

McKinnon Secondary College Principal Pitsa​ Binnion​ said the rise in concern from parents about cyberbullying could be attributed to the fact that they did not grow up with these challenges when they were teens.

"We weren't raised with this technology being so available, and lives totally revolving around the digital framework. So therefore, it's an unknown for parents," she said.

Mrs Binnion also said cyberbullying victims were often reluctant to tell parents for fear of worrying them, but also because they might be punished by having their devices taken away.

Ms Harawa said that victims were also worried to speak out because of consequences from bullies.

"A lot of children don't speak out about it because they're scared of how the bully might react or think that things might get worse," she said.

The study also showed that more than 90 per cent of teenagers recognised that cyberbullying was a problem for young people in Australia, with one third regarding it as an "extremely big problem".

This statistic does not surprise Mrs Binnion.

"That exclusion, that harassment of that nature, and then when everybody jumps on the bandwagon, I think is very, very difficult for teenagers to navigate ... teenagers just want to belong," she said.

Despite this, Ms Harawa said young people needed to tackle cyberbullying and the best way to do that was though positive education.

"It's important to spread awareness and use our voices and create change. If we don't speak up now we'll never see justice for the people around us."

"Violence against violence and hate against hate isn't going to do anything, it's just going to make the situation worse. You need to educate ignorance with a positive energy and actually outline what the issue is and make [the bullies] understand the situation, rather than feeding into it negatively."

A new program to combat cyberbullying will be launched on Monday.

- by Jessica Carrascalao Heard, James Wong

smh.com.au