A recent photograph on the front page of the Spanish daily El Mundo was a shocker.

It showed a young boy in a classroom standing over an 11-year-old schoolmate and taking a swing at his head.

The victim was recoiling and raising his arms to defend himself.

The photo was taken from a video that showed several boys beating the daylights out of the child.

Equally shocking was the setting – the Colegio Suizo, an expensive private school near the upmarket Madrid neighbourhood of La Moraleja – highlighting the facts that bullying is a growing problem in Spain and that it can happen in even the best educational institutions.

A recent study put the number of children harassed in some way by classmates in Spanish schools at 23 per cent. Experts say that what happens in Spain is only the tip of the iceberg and bullying is common across Europe.

These days, parents, teachers and child psychologists are now coming to grips with how widespread bullying is and are trying to combat the problem, whether it is physical violence, threats of violence, verbal abuse or just socially isolating a victim.

Expatriate kids, of course, are not immune as children who are different in some way from their peers are the most frequent targets of bullies.

"My parents took me out of German schools and put me into an American school because I was always picked on for being different," said one young German-American who lives in Berlin and grew up in Munich. "I certainly liked it better but I certainly don't feel integrated in German society."

Some don't want to opt for such a solution.

"We moved here to the Costa Blanca four years ago and sent our son and daughter to British schools," says a British businessman, who preferred to remain anonymous.

"But these schools were ‘Little Englands’ isolated from Spanish society and as we wanted them to integrate into the culture around them, we put them in a Spanish state school. That's when the trouble began.

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