A person who sees, or hears about, behaviours like bullying is called a bystander. One of the most effective ways to stop bullying is by getting bystanders involved. 

A bystander who gets involved to try and stop the bullying is called an upstander. 

If you see, or hear about, bullying happening, be an upstander. There’s no one right way to be an upstander. Being an upstander doesn’t necessarily mean confronting the bully. Sometimes that might make things worse. 

Things you can do

Here are some things upstanders can do:

• Check in with the person being bullied to make sure they are ok. Find out more about how to check in to support your friends.
• If you feel safe, call out the behaviour and make clear that it’s not ok.
• Create a distraction to stop the bullying from happening. You might do this by changing the subject, or taking the person being bullied aside.
• If someone makes an inappropriate comment or joke, pretend you don’t get it and ask them to explain it to you. They’ll probably think twice before making a comment like that again.
• Encourage other bystanders to be upstanders. If there’s another bystander witnessing what’s happening, call them out by name to get them to back you up. You might say something like, “Wow that’s actually really inappropriate, right Mira?”
• Ask an adult for help. If there’s an adult around in the moment, you can call out to them and ask them to step in. Or you can talk to an adult after the incident and ask for their help. 

Download the poster

Organisations and businesses can download and display our Be an upstander poster to support children and young people to take action. 

We have printable PDFs for A4 and A3 printing.