It is eight in the morning and this center of maximum complexity begins to receive its first students. A group of teenagers sit on a step. They greet each other by high fives. They are in the second year of ESO, judging by the books they carry under their arms. Between evasions and misgivings, they end up explaining that they have also seen, and shared, the video of the sexual assault an 11-year-old girl at the Magic shopping center in Badalona last November. They are 13 year old boys and girls. “They passed it through a Telegram group, everyone was there. We saw it and some downloaded it,” she explains.
The video, which went unnoticed by the teaching staff, spread like wildfire among the students during the months of November and December without any alert being activated. The content finally reached the ears of the brother of the victim, also a student downtown, in mid-December. It was then that the boy recounted at home what they had explained to him, and the minor shared what had happened to him. In December, the family reported the events to the Mossos d’Esquadra, which finished identifying all the attackers in mid-February. Now, in March, three months later, the school has met with the affected family, addresses the issue and Educació meets with the schools involved. “They have not taken our cell phones to check who had shared the images, but they have insisted that doing so is wrong,” explain the adolescents, who assure that this week the center’s teachers have decided to talk about sexual violence and cyberviolence to the students.
More cases emerge
It was not an easy talk. “A girl in the class raised her hand and said that something similar had been done to her too“, says a student. The class was silent. The girl explained that she had suffered the attack in January and that the stalkers had followed her to the entrance of the institute. The Mossos are not aware of any complaint for this fact. Be that as it may, it would not be related to those involved in the attack on the shopping center.
What is evident is that, as soon as sexist and sexual violence is worked on and treated, cases emerge. That is why experts insist on the need to deal with affective-sexual education in classrooms immediately, urgent and transversal. The general consensus is that, in this matter, in Badalona and everywhere, we are very late.
“Don’t say anything, let’s see if they’re going to hurt you,” warns one student to another, at the gates of the center. Among the boys there is a lot of fear to talk about this case and what happens at school. The tension can be chewed. “Yes, one of the accused children He goes to our class, but now he’s isolated in an office”, they explain. The boy is under 14 years of age, and therefore not legally liable.
The Department of Education, which this Friday met with the schools attended by those involved and the victim, recalled that measures of exclusion from the classroom cannot be applied to unimputable minors, since it would violate the legal system . They have not explained how they will resolve the situation in which, for the moment, the minor involved remains isolated in an office. The ‘conselleria’ has limited itself to informing that, through Inspection, instructions have been given to the centers to follow the protocol for action with children under 14 years of age in situations of conflict or commission of a criminal offence.
Referrals and early detection
In Badalona these days they don’t talk about anything else. A question rumbles among the child care entities in the city. “What have we done as a society so that some children of 13 and 14 years have nothing better to do on a Saturday morning than go to a shopping center and assault a girl? It is a very complex problem and there are no simple answers. But what is evident is that it is not an isolated case, but that it puts us before the mirror of what are we adults doing wrongthey are children and in the end they absorb the world that we show them,” says an educator from the area, quite concerned.
Related news
“The lack of extracurricular and leisure activities, the deficit of educational referents, child poverty and the lack of real policies for parenting has consequences”, he points out. The reality is that, in the most depressed neighborhoods of Badalona, places in free educational services for families are limited and the lack of resources in social services makes it difficult that families and minors who need it can participate in these educational spaces, very useful in monitoring, prevention and early detection.
“You have to think that violent sexual behaviors do not appear out of nowhere. There are a preliminary phase of contacts, behaviors and comments inadequate that go unnoticed… and then we are already late”, summarizes an expert in attention to sexual violence, who asks to flee from the punitive logic and bet on the re-education of adolescents.