A child climbs onto a school roof
Some years ago, a girl in Malé tried to take her own life. She had been bullied at school. Her story is not unique. It is not old.
The 2014 Global School-based Student Health Survey found that one in four children in the Maldives were being bullied. Seven percent of bullied adolescents reported being kicked, hit, pushed, shoved, or locked indoors. Cyberbullying has grown alongside the smartphone in every child’s hand. We have almost no data on how bad it has become.
For nearly a decade, parents and teachers have asked Parliament to act. A 2017 petition demanding that bullying be made a crime gathered signatures from across the country. The Education Ministry’s 2018 anti-bullying policy was a beginning. But a policy without trained staff, without community awareness, and without legal teeth is a leaflet. It is not a shield. A criminal anti-bullying law is overdue. But “overdue” does not mean “any law will do.” A poorly drafted statute can fail victims. It can criminalise children. It can hand the government a new tool for silencing critics. And it can leave the playground exactly as it was. This article lays out what a serious anti-bullying law should look like. It looks at what global and Islamic legal traditions actually teach. It identifies the dangers of overreach. Most importantly, it asks what no law alone can fix.
What a credible anti-bullying law contains
International practice points to a clear set of building blocks. The Malaysian Anti-Bullying Bill 2025, passed in December, is the freshest reference in the region. Malaysia’s July 2025 Penal Code amendments add criminal provisions for harassment. The UAE’s Federal Decree-Law 34 of 2021 is the most aggressive criminal model in the Islamic world. The Philippines has had Republic Act 10627 since 2013, giving us thirteen years of evidence. Finland’s KiVa programme is the proof that legislation alone has never solved this problem anywhere.
A serious bill should include the following.
- A precise definition. Bullying must be defined narrowly. Ordinary citizens should be able to tell what is prohibited. Malaysia defines it as a wilful act causing physical, psychological, or social harm. It can be repeated or a single severe incident. That is a reasonable starting point. What it must not be is “any conduct that causes alarm or distress.” That kind of phrase appears in vague harassment laws across the world. Courts that take free expression seriously have struck them down repeatedly.
- Tiered responses. Pushing a classmate is not the same as posting a humiliating video. Sustained intimidation of a younger child is not the same as an adult cornering a co-worker. A workable law sorts these into tiers. School-level discipline. Civil compensation. Criminal sanction. Criminal penalties should be reserved for the gravest conduct. That means physical violence, threats, sustained harassment, the sharing of intimate images without consent, or hate-based targeting. Most school bullying should never reach a courtroom.
- A civil tribunal with real powers. Malaysia’s model is instructive. A dedicated tribunal with civil jurisdiction can order compensation. It can mandate counselling for the child and the parents. It can impose criminal penalties only when its orders are defied. This separates routine remediation from criminal prosecution. The Maldives has a small population and limited court capacity. A specialised body would help. It could sit within or work closely with the Family Protection Authority.
- Clear duties on schools and employers. A law without institutional duties leaves victims where they are now. Schools should be required to set up reporting channels. They should train staff. They should protect those who report. They should report serious incidents within fixed timeframes. Workplaces should be brought under similar duties. This matters especially for the resort sector, where Maldivian researchers have documented widespread bullying with little redress. The Employment Act and Gender Equality Act address sexual harassment. They leave a serious gap on bullying.
- Cyberbullying provisions, drafted carefully. This is where the most damage is done to children today. It is also where laws most often slide into censorship. The provisions should target conduct. That means sustained harassment, threats, image-based abuse, and doxxing. They should not target viewpoint or “offensive content.”
- Child-sensitive procedures. Hearings involving minors should be closed. Records should be sealed. The minimum age of criminal responsibility under the 2019 Juvenile Justice Act must be respected. Rehabilitation, not punishment, should be the default for child perpetrators. A law that turns children into criminal defendants for school-yard conduct will harm more children than it helps.
- Compensation and support for victims. Counselling matters more to a victim than the prosecution of an offender. So does a transfer of school where needed. So do civil damages and protection orders.
Islamic jurisprudence: a richer framework than is often acknowledged
A common framing in the Maldives is that Islamic law is silent on bullying. The reasoning goes that there is no specific hadd, no fixed Qur’anic punishment, for it. This is a misreading. Islamic jurisprudence speaks at length about the conduct that bullying comprises. In many respects, it treats it more strictly than secular law does.
The Qur’an in Surah al-Hujurat (49:11–12) explicitly forbids ridicule, name-calling, suspicion, spying, and ghibah. Ghibah means speaking ill of an absent person, even if what is said is true. The Prophet (peace be upon him) defined it as “saying about your brother that which he would dislike.” Buhtan, or slander, is saying what is untrue. All four major Sunni schools, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali, classify these as major sins. The Shafi’i school, dominant in the Maldives, holds, along with the other schools, that even listening to backbiting without objection makes one complicit.
What Islamic law does not provide is a fixed corporal punishment for these offences. They fall instead under ta’zir. Ta’zir is discretionary punishment by the ruler or judge, calibrated to the offence and the offender. This is precisely the doctrinal space in which a modern legislature acts when it codifies offences and penalties.
Several lessons follow for Maldivian lawmakers.
First, an anti-bullying law is not in tension with Islamic tradition. It gives institutional form to obligations the Shari’ah already places on Muslims. Drafters should be encouraged to cite this foundation openly. It will help the law’s legitimacy with religious scholars and the public.
Second, classical jurisprudence is also clear about the limits of criminalising speech. Classical scholars, including al-Ghazali and al-Nawawi, catalogued exceptions to the prohibition on ghibah. These include complaining of a wrongdoing to someone who can correct it. They include warning others about a harm. They include seeking justice from authority. A Maldivian law should not be drawn so broadly that it captures legitimate complaint, journalism, criticism of officials, or whistle-blowing. Such a law would be inconsistent with Islamic legal tradition itself, not just with international human rights standards.
Third, regional Muslim-majority practice is a mixed guide. The UAE’s cybercrime law imposes prison sentences and fines of AED 250,000 to 500,000 for online “insult.” It is often cited as a model compliant with Islamic jurisprudence. In practice, it has been used not only against bullies but against journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens criticising public figures. Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions Law has produced the same pattern. Saudi Arabia’s discretionary ta’zir regime has likewise been criticised for sweeping in dissent. These are warnings. They are not models to copy uncritically.
Pakistan’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, Brunei’s online conduct provisions, and Malaysia’s new Penal Code sections all share a tendency. They draft offence elements in language so broad that the offence becomes whatever a prosecutor decides on a given day. Phrases like “causes alarm” or “likely to cause distress” do most of this work. This is not a feature of Islamic jurisprudence. It is a feature of weak drafting.
Safeguards against executive and legislative overreach
This is the part of the conversation that tends to get lost. When a law is framed around the protection of children, scrutiny becomes hard. It should not be lost.
The Maldives is a small country. It has a recent history of democratic backsliding. The executive controls a parliamentary supermajority. As of September 2025, the country has a media regulation law that international press-freedom groups have described as among the most restrictive in the region. The instruments a state builds to protect children today are the instruments available to be turned on adults tomorrow.
Several specific safeguards belong in the bill.
- Narrow, clearly defined offences. A criminal statute must define conduct with enough precision. An ordinary person should know what is prohibited. Police, prosecutors, and judges should not be able to apply it arbitrarily. Phrases like “content contrary to public order,” “causing alarm,” or “harming national values” should be excluded from any anti-bullying provision. Elements should require intent. They should require targeting of a specific person. They should require either repetition or severe single-incident harm.
- An explicit free-expression carve-out. The bill should state plainly that political speech, journalism, academic criticism, religious sermon, satire, public-interest reporting, and good-faith complaint are not bullying. Without this, the law will be tested in cases involving critics of officials.
- Independent adjudication. A tribunal whose members are appointed entirely by the executive is not independent. Nor is one whose members can be removed by parliamentary majority. Members should have fixed terms. They should have security of tenure. There should be transparent appointment criteria. There should be a mix of judicial, educational, and civil-society representation. The recent restructuring of the Maldives Media Commission is the model to avoid. Three of seven members are appointed by the President. The chair is also presidentially appointed.
- A high evidentiary threshold for criminal cases. Civil tribunal proceedings can operate on the balance of probabilities. Criminal prosecutions must require proof beyond reasonable doubt. Defendants need the right to counsel, the right to confront accusers, and full appeal rights. There should be no reverse burdens. There should be no presumption-of-guilt provisions.
- No criminalisation of children. Conduct by minors should be handled under the Juvenile Justice Act. The approach should be restorative and rehabilitative. Imprisonment of children should not be the answer. The age threshold for criminal liability should not be lower than the existing minimum age of criminal responsibility.
- Sunset and review clauses. A formal review of the law should happen within three years. It should be published. It should be debated in Parliament. It should be informed by independent data. Reviews should continue every five years thereafter. Bad laws stay on the books because no one is required to look at them again.
- Protection against malicious complaints. There should be penalties for knowingly false bullying complaints. These must be balanced against protection for good-faith reports. Without this, the law becomes a weapon in personal disputes.
- Clear separation from defamation and sedition law. Bullying targets a specific person. It involves a power imbalance. It causes harm. It is not the same as defamation of a public figure. It is not criticism of government. It is not “insult” of an institution. The bill should say so explicitly. It should not be drafted as an amendment to existing defamation, cybercrime, or public-order statutes whose breadth has already drawn international criticism.
Does it actually work? The evidence on anti-bullying laws
The honest answer is that the evidence is mixed. The laws themselves are only one ingredient.
Systematic reviews of anti-bullying laws find modest, conditional effects. Most of this research comes from the United States, where every state has such a law. Laws that include a clear statement of scope work better. So do laws that define prohibited behaviours specifically. So do laws that require schools to develop and implement local policies.
Laws that consist mainly of declarations show little or no effect. So do laws that rely on “zero tolerance” suspension and expulsion. The American Psychological Association and others have found that zero-tolerance policies actually increase aggression and harm school climate.
Iowa’s longitudinal data tells the same story. So do thirteen years of the Philippines under RA 10627. Meta-analyses across multiple countries reach the same conclusion. Laws can help, but only when they require real implementation. That means trained counsellors. It means clear reporting protocols. It means follow-up. It means accountability for schools that fail to act. Laws that exist only on paper produce mostly cynicism.
The single most effective anti-bullying intervention identified in research is not a law at all. It is Finland’s KiVa programme. KiVa is a whole-school intervention focused on bystanders. Bystanders are the children who watch bullying happen. They either intervene, ignore, or amplify it. KiVa includes lessons, classroom exercises, online games, clear protocols for staff, and regular monitoring. Randomised controlled trials with 30,000 children showed substantial reductions in both bullying and victimisation. Nearly 2,000 Finnish schools now use it. Many countries have adopted it.
The lesson is not that the Maldives should not pass a law. The lesson is that the law is the floor. It is not the building.
What no law can fix
A criminal statute cannot put a trained counsellor in every school. The Maldives currently has roughly 60 counsellors for over 87,000 students. Those students are scattered across nearly 200 inhabited islands. A statute cannot teach a teacher how to defuse a bullying incident without humiliating either child. It cannot replace the parent who tells a son that “boys will be boys.” It cannot reach the grandparent who shrugs at a daughter being shamed online. It cannot reach inside a family WhatsApp group where rumours about a teenage girl are forwarded. It cannot stop the resort manager who quietly punishes the staff member who complained.
What is needed alongside legislation includes the following.
- The deployment and training of school counsellors at a real scale. This is by far the most concrete and useful intervention available. It is also the most costly. UNICEF and the Education Ministry have been working at it for years. The budget has not kept pace.
- A national, evidence-based whole-school anti-bullying programme, adapted to Maldivian and Islamic context. KiVa-style approaches focused on bystander behaviour have shown the strongest results globally. The materials and lesson plans can be licensed. What cannot be imported is the institutional commitment to run them year after year.
- Real digital-literacy education for children, parents, and teachers. This should address both online bullying and the group dynamics that drive it. Most Maldivian children now experience their worst harassment on platforms where adults rarely look.
- Mental-health services accessible without stigma. The Family Protection Authority’s helplines and UNICEF’s “Udhihilan” campaign, launched in September 2025, are starts. They need to be funded. They need to be sustained. They need to be connected to schools.
- A frank cultural conversation. It needs to happen in mosques, in kateebu offices, and on television. It needs to address ghibah, namimah, and sukhriah as Islam treats them. These are not minor faults. They are serious harms to a person’s dignity and to the umma. The Maldives has the religious infrastructure to make this case persuasively. Few countries do.
- Workplace reform. The resort sector and the public service should be brought under genuine anti-bullying duties. There should be enforceable reporting channels. There should be protection for those who use them. The current Employment Act and Labour Relations Authority framework is not equipped for this. It admits as much in its own gaps.
- Parental engagement and parenting-support programmes. Malaysia’s bill explicitly allows tribunals to order parenting interventions. The reasoning is honest. Children’s behaviour does not begin or end at the school gate.
A question for the People’s Majlis, and for the rest of us
The Majlis is being asked to do something difficult. It must give the law sharper teeth than it has ever had on conduct that has been treated as private and informal until now. At the same time, it must not hand the executive yet another tool whose contours can be redrawn against critics.
The test of this bill should be a pair of questions, asked together.
- Would this law have helped the girl on the school roof?
- And could this law be used, ten years from now, against a journalist, a critic, a rival politician, or a teenager who said something true and uncomfortable?
If the answer to the first is yes, and the answer to the second is no, the bill is worth passing. If either answer is wrong, the bill needs more work. The country has waited long enough for the first answer to become yes. It cannot afford to get the second answer wrong.
This article is intended to inform public discussion. It draws on the Maldives’ own legal scholarship, the 2018 Education Ministry anti-bullying policy, the Child Rights Protection Act and Juvenile Justice Act of 2019, regional comparators including Malaysia’s Anti-Bullying Bill 2025 and the UAE’s Federal Decree-Law 34 of 2021, and international research including systematic reviews of anti-bullying law effectiveness and evaluations of the KiVa programme.
