Empowering students to stand up for their peers

Stymie is an anonymous harm reporting tool that schools are proactively using to support their students to say something without fear.

Stymie helps combat the bystander effect by enabling students to report incidents of bullying and harm, safely and anonymously.

• The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation.

• Social influence affects how bystanders behave, and students are less likely to stand up to bullying behaviours in public when the number of onlookers is high.

• This bystander effect is also caused by a diffusion of responsibility – the belief that someone else will help.

Taking into account that our kids are very socially invested, many of them don’t feel as though they can speak up and often, they just don’t know how.

Rather than trying to work against this peer pressure, our solution recognises the nuanced nature of their social currency, by providing security and anonymity to the bystanding community.

Flexischools is proud to partner with Stymie and it’s founder Rachel Downie, to provide more relevant information to our parent community.