The Support Unit for students in situations of violence of the Ministry of Education (Usav) has received a total of 1,545 cases of possible situations of violence in the school environment this academic year 2022-2023, with a predominance of bullying, with 682 reported cases, according to this department.
These data contrast with those of the previous academic year, when from September 2021 to September 2022 there were a total of 863 cases reported by students, families, teachers or management teams.
Of all the types, the biggest is bullying. From September 2022 to July 17, 2023, the Usav has received 682 cases of harassment. Secondly, situations of child and youth abuse have been denounced with 445 communications.
In addition, there have been 229 consultations or openings of files for sexist violence and 48 for mental health issues such as suicide attempts, consummated suicides or violence derived from a mental disorder. Ten cases have been classified as racism. Finally, 131 communications fall into other categories.
The increase in cases is due, according to the general director of Students, Anna Chillida, to greater awareness and an improvement in the identification of violence. It has also contributed to increasing awareness by the educational community of the existence of this unit that does not close in summer.
On the other hand, the report of the Discrimination Observatory corresponding to the year 2022 indicates that the city of Barcelona recorded a total of 631 situations of discrimination in 2022, 20% more than the previous year, with racism and xenophobia as the main causes of these expressions of hate, followed by Lgtbiphobia.
Racism and xenophobia registered a total of 185 situations of discrimination last year, followed by Lgtbiphobia, with 129; health, with 120; the tongue, with 90; aporophobia, with 82; disability, with 68; gender, with 51; religion, with 19; ideology, with 17; and age, with 6.
48.2% of reported situations of discrimination have been suffered by men, while women are victims of 40.1%, although compared to 2021 the presence of females has increased by 10 points in the registry of cases.
In 5.7% of the cases the discrimination was suffered by groups or collectives and in the rest of the cases the gender was not specified.
Regarding age, there is a low representation of the very young and the oldest. Most of the complainants are in the range of 40 to 64 years, followed by those from 25 to 39 years. Together they account for three quarters of the complainants.
In contrast, the youngest age group, from 15 to 24 years old, represented 12%, and those over 65 years old, 5.2%.
The data also highlights that health discrimination tripled in 2022, mainly due to situations related to mental health (70) and HIV diagnoses (31), data that has increased thanks to improvements in the case registration process.
