Educational social group work practice programme on bullying amongst school learners in South Africa: A literature review

Abstract

Bullying amongst learners is a subject of great concern within the school arena in South Africa and requires urgent attention and  interventions from all interested parties including social workers. This paper has adopted literature review as its methodology. Literature  has been review thematically to give structure and to ensure focus on relevant discussion points. Given the direct linkage between  bullying as a social problem and social work practice, this paper proposes educational social group work practice programme that may  guide social workers in addressing bullying amongst learners. Group work is selected as the ideal method of social work to address  bullying because within the group context members support one another for the better and more than one person will benefit in the  group, unlike in individual cases. The paper further discusses programme activities that may be crucial for social workers in the  implementation of the proposed educational social group work programme on bullying. Therefore, interventions are necessary in order  to contribute towards the prevention and reduction of bullying incidents.