Grace vs law? How should Christian parents respond when children are bullied?

Setting the scene

Imagine…

Your 13-year-old child comes in from school. She collapses on the floor and from her place of brokenness she cries, ‘Mum, I just can’t do it anymore. Life just isn’t worth living.’ Your heart fills instantly with sadness for the desperation that your child is feeling. Then in an instant it is replaced with rage for the injustice that she is having to face. You see, your daughter has faced relentless bullying over the past year by one group of children in her class. The bullying has often been physical and has continued online in places where your child once felt safe; her home, her bedroom; her church. There has been no escape and respite. And as a parent, you’ve approached the school numerous times over the past year. You’ve gone down all the right channels and complained in all the right ways. You have raised concerns, spoke to the senior leadership team, made formal complaints, but the bullying still continues.

You look at your daughter again, collapsed on the floor, her face a mixture of tears and snot. She is broken. All you can see is the baby that you bore, that you raised to become a strong independent girl, with a strong sense of faith and justice, now fully broken and contemplating the value of her own life. Enraged with the injustice of it all, you pick up your coat, run to the school and confront the bully yourself. Mama bear has been poked, and the reaction is instinctively protection. 

What would you do? This story comes from one Australian mum’s reaction to the bullying that her daughter faced. But this isn’t an isolated case. There are hundreds of these types of stories across the world every year. You might hae been privy to a conversation between a parent and their child where the child has been hit and encouraged to hit the person back, but twice as hard so they won’t do it again. Maybe you have had a similar conversation with your own child.

The quandry for Christian parents

What should our message be as Christians? One full of grace or one that requires us to implement every aspect of the law in order to bring justice to a situation? Does operating out of grace mean that you become a target to bullies? Should we ‘turn the other cheek’ like the Bible advises us (Matthew 5:39)? Does the well-meaning advice of ‘hitting them harder’ turn the victim into the aggressor? Or do we rely on the law to fight the injustices that we face? Which is it? grace or law?