<![CDATA[Bullying in senior high schools engages not only educational and psychological concerns but also difficult questions of legal qualification, juvenile criminal responsibility, and child protection. This article addresses a specific doctrinal problem: how two civil-law-influenced Southeast Asian systems—Indonesia and Thailand legally qualify and respond to bullying committed by, and against, school-aged children, and to what extent their frameworks adequately reconcile the penal response with the best interests of the child, assessed against five normative benchmarks: legality and legal certainty, the best interests of the child, proportionality, ultimum remedium, and victim protection. The study is doctrinal and comparative. For Indonesia it examines the new Criminal Code (Law No. 1 of 2023, in force 2 January 2026), the Child Protection Act (Law No. 35 of 2014, Arts 76C and 80), the Juvenile Criminal Justice System Act (Law No. 11 of 2012), and the Ministerial Regulation on the Prevention and Handling of Violence in Educational Units (Permendikbudristek No. 46 of 2023); for Thailand it examines the Penal Code (ss 73-75, as amended in 2022), the Child Protection Act B.E. 2546 (2003, ss 22, 26–27, 29 and 40-42), and the Juvenile and Family Court and Procedure Act B.E. 2553 (2010, ss 86 and 90). Applying six explicit comparative criteria legal definition, minimum age of criminal responsibility, resolution mechanisms, sanctions and measures, victim protection, and restorative orientation the analysis finds the two systems to be more convergent than a punitive/preventive dichotomy suggests: both decline to criminalise bullying as a discrete offence, both set the minimum age of criminal responsibility at twelve, and both prioritise diversion, protective measures, and administrative school-level mechanisms over punishment. The principal differences lie in the specificity of the regulatory definition of bullying and in institutional design. Measured against the benchmarks, both frameworks are adequate as regards the best interests of the child, proportionality, ultimum remedium, and victim protection, but only partially adequate as regards legal certainty, because neither criminal law captures the repeated and relational structure of bullying. The article draws doctrinal implications for Indonesian reform. It does not assess enforcement in practice.]]>
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