Tho original comment is gone, so posting this here.

I was in school in the 80s. Bullied horribly (including physical violence). I finally dropped out in my junior year. You hear about it more, because we have faster/more modes of communication (used to be just whatever made it to national news at 6 and 11) and more modes of capturing evidence. Think about that case where the girl goaded her boyfriend into suicide. This could have happened in the 1970s over the phone. No one would know about it. There would have been no evidence.