Stories Against Silence: A Digital Literary Lab for Safer Schools

Abstract

Bullying remains a significant school-community concern in Indonesia, where PISA 2022 recorded recurrent victimisation among 25% of girls and 30% of boys. This community engagement program aimed to strengthen anti-bullying awareness, emotional reflection, and help-seeking capacity among 60 students at SMAN 1 Besuki, Situbondo. A participatory planning-implementation-monitoring-evaluation design combined a 75-item Safe School Survey, a 20-item pre-post instrument, anti-bullying focus-group discussion, guided application practice, mentoring, attendance monitoring, output assessment, and partner validation. Planning involved three school representatives and seven university team members and generated 14 documented outputs across six components. Implementation recorded 58 orientation participants, 57 initial assessments, 52 FGD outputs, 51 application-practice outputs, 49 mentoring records, and 51 matched post-tests. Descriptive evaluation showed changes in bullying knowledge from 62 to 84, emotional well-being from 60 to 78, and reflective literacy from 58 to 81, alongside a decline in anxiety scores from 68 to 52; participant retention reached 85.0%, while sustainability readiness reached 80.0%. These are descriptive, single-group pre-post changes without inferential testing or a comparison group and should not be read as evidence of causal effect. The novelty of this program lies in integrating digital literary reflection, participatory bullying mapping, matched measurement, documented mentoring, and school-led follow-up within a single data-informed community-engagement model