Imagine your daughter being on the cusp of her teenage years. She’s sassy and awkward, and vulnerable, and she plays with her phone a tad too much.

On this morning, she goes to the toilet at school; her phone clutched in her hand. When the bell sounds, she races up to class, forgetting the phone that now sits in a cubicle downstairs.

It’s found, before it locks, by a slightly older girl who takes a picture of her own genitalia before uploading it to those in the owner’s contact list.

Imagine what happens next – when the parents of that young student – let’s call her Claire – receive the picture? And her friends? Her grandmother? And that boy from another school she thinks she might like?

Claire only finds out later. And has not returned to school.

Or imagine the student we’ll call Debbie, who is also 12, and who becomes the target of a group of mean girls in her class.

They take a snap of her head, and then cleverly – using skills that are fairly primitive – digitally crown it onto a naked body, before sending it out to the universe.

Debbie is innocent, and oblivious, until she finds herself facing a suspension.

Her parents – on seeing the photograph – also question their daughter’s judgment, until the digital image is taken apart by an expert.

It’s 100 per cent fake.

Imagine the girls – because there will be more than one – who tonight will receive a swag of messages from made-up accounts that suggest song lists they might listen to, while they harm or even kill themselves.

They are someone’s daughters, nieces, sisters and grandchildren.

Or the boy, also 12, who has been ordered to send $200 to scammers because he has uploaded a “dick pic” to someone he believes is the girl he might ask to his school formal, in a couple of years’ time.

Last week, on the same day, I was told about three boys in that situation at one Australian school. And there is no doubt they are being targeted by crime networks on the other side of the world.

In many of these stories, and hundreds more, the student will no longer be able to return to school.

And this makes up a tiny slice of the unforgivable bullying that is targeting our children in public and private schools, across Australia, each day.

Sydney schoolgirl Charlotte this week has gifted us the opportunity to truly talk about this as a nation; to consider whether our own children might be vulnerable, and to demand our authorities better respond to what is now a national epidemic.

We should all be invested in helping Charlotte’s parents Matt and Kelly spread the word.

But we shouldn’t underestimate the size and complexity of this problem, or how nuanced it might be.

Often, it’s hard to imagine children being so cruel and unkind as to encourage others to hurt themselves.

That’s particularly hard, perhaps, for their parents who often bristle at the idea that their child could be involved.

It’s hard on schools, too. How do they police or regulate or get to the bottom of an unseen problem that often happens outside school hours, and outside the school gates?

Charlotte’s case is just one case, and one that has become public.

This is now happening too often, and it would be ignorant to think the leaders at Santa Sabina College in Sydney are not also hurting. At other schools, educators know that this could happen tomorrow, or next week, in their own playground.

Just consider the magnitude of the problem. One national report has found about 550,000 bullies instigate more than 45 million incidents each year in Australia.

Another has found one-third of all year 5s report frequent school bullying. And another tags Australia as having one of the highest rates of student bullying in the world.

All of those are authoritative, and only represent a portion of the massive research – in Australia and overseas – into this area.

But it’s time to act. That’s what Charlotte, in her suicide note, was saying. She wanted her parents to tell us all about her pain. And to stop it for others.

It’s the same pain being felt by students in Perth and Penrith, Brisbane and Bendigo, Adelaide and Hobart and everywhere in between.

Is it time for a standard, consistent approach to investigating bullying – in the same way we now have taken smartphones out of classrooms across the country?

Is there a role, given the seriousness of some of the allegations, for a new branch of investigators to focus on school bullying, rather than leaving it often, to an inexperienced teacher?

Should we be considering safe rooms at lunch time? Or on-site practices that are evidenced-based and carry a gold tick from the nation’s e-safety commissioner?

Charlotte’s parents should not be holding a funeral this week. But let’s use that as the impetus to look beyond what we cannot change to what we might be able to address.

That’s what Charlotte asked us to do.

This piece was first published by InQueensland