Secondary school students in Catalonia believe that the following statement is true: “There are also many women who assault men, but this is not talked about”. A belief that is “very worrying” for the head of security and transversal policies of the Ministry of the Interior, Alba Alfageme, who yesterday presented the School Coexistence and Security Survey prepared every five years, corresponding to the 2021-2022 academic year.
In general, students give the previous sentence a truthfulness of 6 on a scale from 0 to 10, but in the case of boys the score rises to 6.9. Another statement with a considerable degree of acceptance is: “Macho violence is an invention: women also mistreat men, but in a different way.” The boys surveyed almost agree with this statement and give it a veracity of 4.7 out of 10. The girls, on the other hand, basically disagree (2.2).
“We must address and attack these arguments that we have detected and that are more prevalent among boys than among girls”, Alfageme pointed out, to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas that take root “as we saw in Sunday’s elections”, he affirmed. The survey shows that girls have a greater perception of risk and change their habits when they reach ESO for fear of being assaulted, he continued, such as looking for safer ways to go to school (35% of ESO girls), stop participating in social networks (18%) or stop going out with friends for fear of trouble (14%). “And this already marks his personal experience in the future”, indicates the chief of staff.
The perception of risk of some kind of sexual aggression among peers is high (3 out of 4 students say so), but it is more so among teenage girls. 86% of girls consider that peers of their age suffer sexual assault, such as harassment or annoying comments, insults and touching, and 60% of girls say they have been victims of sexual violence (50% in secondary school and 75% in high school).
What kind of violence? Students say they have personally experienced sexual comments (46% of girls vs. 10% of boys), messages received (36%, vs. 11%), requests for photos of sexual content (35% vs. 11%), harassment or stalking (34% vs. 6%), touching (18% vs. 6%), offers of money (12% vs. 4%), violent touching (4% vs. 2%), and unwanted sexual intercourse (3.3 % compared to 1.6%).
The report also details that more than half of students – including 27% of primary school students – claim that they have accessed pages with adult content – ??although it is not specified whether it is pornography, gambling or chats. This is a more common practice among boys (64%) than among girls (44%).
The extensive x-ray on school coexistence is based on a survey of 2,524 4th, 5th and 6th grade students, 5,158 high school students and 2,458 high school and middle school students. In general, 64% of students say they are victims of some type of violence, such a percentage that in secondary schools it has increased by 17 points compared to previous editions, while in primary schools it has decreased by 4 points. According to Alfageme, this is due to a greater identification of situations of school violence by students who no longer see teasing, teasing a classmate or physical aggression as normal.
