The first half of Ian Thorpe's boundary-pushing documentary Bullied has been met with substantial praise online from viewers, media figures and even a former Australian Prime Minister after its airing on Tuesday night.
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The first episode of the two-part series focused on Kelsey, a 14-year-old boy from Queensland, who was bullied and harassed by other students on a daily basis. The show involved Kelsey discreetly filming acts of bullying, with the footage later being presented to school officials and other students.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the program was "compulsory viewing", while Kelsey's mother was active on social media throughout the night, and revealed that her son was now enrolled in distance education for his own safety, and was "doing well in DE".
But not everyone was on board - psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg slammed the series on 3AW, telling Neil Mitchell; "They went into that school without the permission of the school, the kids that were photographed, they were pixelated, but they were all filmed without permission, they didn't know they were being filmed.
"These kids' rights were violated, I feel very strongly that the kids who are featured in the program are now exposed to further victimisation... the kid who is bullied is clearly identified."
Right now, Queensland is the only state that allows hidden cameras.
Despite it rising to the top of Australia's trending topics on Twitter, and the discussion being almost all in support of the program, it failed to make a significant dent in terms of ratings.
The program scraped into 20th place on the list of most viewed programs for the day, bringing in 387,000 viewers across the five major metropolitan areas. For comparison, Four Corners, which ran in the same timeslot on the ABC the night before clocked 566,000.
Thanks everyone for your support of #bullied. Now lets support all young people who find themselves bullied. @ABCTV??? Ian Thorpe (@IanThorpe) March 14, 2017
That's not reality TV. #bullied is reality TV. Well done @IanThorpe.??? Richard Hinds (@rdhinds) March 14, 2017
Thorpe, 34, also recently opened up about his own experiences with bullying, and told the ABC yesterday that "some schools are handling this better than others."
The second episode will air next Tuesday at 8.30pm.
Watching #Bullied on ABC. Teacher: "Well what do you want us to do?"
Nothing much seems to have changed in 20 years??? Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) March 14, 2017
So Ian Thorpe's #Bullied on ABC is more evidence we absolutely need to defend #SafeSchools, hope its would-be wreckers are watching.??? Wendy Tuohy (@wtuohy) March 14, 2017
