Where I am (Oz New England) the state has required all schools to develop and implement policies that teach students to respect each other and that interference with another's learning is unacceptable behaviour. It becomes a catch-all that covers all types of bullying (female as well as male) racism, sexism, etc. As can be expected, some schools do it better than others and some do it worse; there is a high school on the NSW North Coast that is currently improving its performance at the direction of the Minister.

In our local city there was a Special School that catered for primary school students with disabilities; when the Education Dept brought in policy requiring all schools to integrate Disabled student programs into the mainstream, that school received "normal" primary students as its routine intake. This school was selected by my partner and I, for our daughters, precisely because it exemplified all the principles and practices of inclusion that I had developed as a teacher in a group of Community Schools (High Schools run "alternatively") in Victoria. Whenever bullying arose (and there was a very interesting case of the deputy principal's daughter allegedly being a perpetrator) it was dealt with swiftly within the school community. This was routinely (and almost always immediately) effective and never involved the police, to my knowledge.

Here, it is clearly understood, as part of their Duty Statement, that school teachers are in loco parentis and are expected to behave accordingly.

Cheers, Rowan