“They are all against me and I have not done anything to them. Why do you do this to me?”. María José’s son did not understand why he was the target of all the insults, threats and mistreatment. In his head, the boy did not understand what had happened so that, from one day to the next, a classmate began to harass him. Soon more would join in, practically the entire class.
That same question is repeated in the minds of many of the victims of bullying, “that is always the child’s question when they arrive at the association and that is why they often wonder if they are the ones who have the problem. My son came to think that he was the problem and we made him see that no, that there was nothing in him for them to do all those things to him”, explains María José Fernández, president of the Madrid Association against School Bullying, which precisely created to prevent other children from going through the same suffering as your son.
The figures for bullying are a worrying reality: 1 in 4 primary school students acknowledge that they have suffered bullying at some time. This is stated in the report Bullying and cyberbullying in primary education in Catalonia prepared by the FC Barcelona Foundation.
This same ratio is the one that appears in the Perception study on bullying in Spanish society, a work of the organization Educar es todo. Of the more than 4,000 students between the ages of 5 and 18 interviewed, 22% admitted having suffered bullying in their own flesh. Something that his parents confirmed. Some parents still don’t know.
María José’s son came to verbalize what was happening to him, but many times it is not like that, although the signs are there. We must pay attention to the changes in attitude of the boys and girls, to the stomach aches that appear on Sunday afternoon and to the stories they make of their day at school.
Listen when he tells us that another boy or girl has told him “you don’t play”, because those three words repeated over time are also a form of bullying. A more elusive in the eyes of adults. “It is social and psychological harassment. If no one wants to do work with him, no one sit next to him on the bus when they go on field trips, no one chooses them in gym. All this is more difficult to detect, but that does not mean that it does not exist”, insists María José.
Laura Sabaté Amorós, coordinator of violence prevention projects at the FC Barcelona Foundation, and Juan Calmaestra, professor at the University of Córdoba and expert advisor to the Foundation, talk to us in this podcast about how to train one’s gaze against bullying. FC Barcelona. Your role is key to preventing bullying. Because 45% of the teachers affirm that they have ever observed bullying situations in their classroom and, nevertheless, 76% of the teachers affirm that they are not prepared or do not know how to deal with bullying or cyberbullying situations.
For its part, and to work on the prevention of bullying, the foundation linked to the LaLiga team has developed a program adapted to primary schools and another to provide tools to sports entities. Because bullying sometimes transcends the strictly school environment and occurs in other settings of the daily life of minors. Hence, the duties are to raise awareness and sensitize the entire society and, together, move forward to protect the victims. They are children, but this is not a children’s thing.
