The legal response and the actions of the authorities have been questioned, not only because it exposes children and adolescents, but also because the regulation does not focus on the complexities that the phenomenon of bullying implies in the school environment.
A series of official announcements through his Twitter account, by the attorney general Tarek William Saab and the Public Ministry (MP) on several cases of accused adolescents, school directors under investigation and open processes for situations of bullying have once again focused on a long-standing problem that has been invisible for years: school bullying, Bullying or also popularly known as “chalequeo”, which is part of school dynamics as a structural problem, highly neglected and marked by violence as a form of response.
All this occurs in connection with the presentation and legislative discussion of the Draft Law to prevent bullying, issued by the National Assembly of 2020, a normative proposal of which already specialized institutions in the field of child protection such as Cecodap warned that The document “It is ambiguous, imprecise and with legal loopholes.”
Carlos Trapani, lawyer and general coordinator of the organization, said that on March 28, the vice president of the Permanent Commission for Education, Health, Science, Technology and Innovation of the National Assembly, Rubén Limas, asked him for comments on the draft law. “We made notes about the purpose of the law, why and what for. We see that the wording is raised in a general way and does not go hand in hand with the complexities that the phenomenon of bullying entails”, explained Trapani.
In addition to the Law, the concern from different organizations pointed to the way in which the head of the Prosecutor’s Office initially proceeded: the exposure through social networks with names and surnames of minors allegedly involved. One case in Guayana, another in Zulia and another in the Capital District in less than a week.
Through videos, Saab denounced the cases that occurred in the Loyola Gumilla schools in Puerto Ordaz, then in the Teresiano school in El Paraíso, in Caracas, and in Los Angelitos in Maracaibo, in which acts of violence and harassment were recorded against students from these institutions by other colleagues.
VIDEO | rector of @colegioloyola question which prosecutor @TarekWiliamSaab expose the image of adolescents in their networks. “She will have all the power, but we have to tell our truth, and that is that she attacked two minors and a teacher,” he said. @arperaza65.pic.twitter.com/qvCqbzwxMC
– Carlos Suniaga G. (@CarlosSuniagaG) May 7, 2022
Attack a problem with another problem
Arturo Peraza, rector of the Loyola Gumilla School, explained that “what the Prosecutor did is an outrage because it upsets an educational process and puts it in a criminalization process. From the beginning, he exposes the two minors, which is a violation of article 65 of the Lopnna because he exposes them to public ridicule and, not content with this, he repeats the behavior by putting the name and surname of one of the minors who appears as accused and also of it, the location of that minor, which is an aggravating circumstance».
Peraza expressed that this action reveals that: “to take care of a situation of bullying, the same attorney general of the Republic commits a situation that supposes moral and verbal aggressions on the two minors.”
Cecodap stated through a statement that the dissemination of this information via social networks promotes that the person involved becomes a victim, is stigmatized, or is judged a priori without really knowing what happened. In the video recorded by students of the institution, it is observed how a student kicks another who is on the floor. But another version of witnesses indicates that the person who appears as the alleged aggressor is a young man who has a condition within the autistic spectrum and was initially the victim.
In addition, in the case of the Loyola Gumilla School, the Public Ministry charged Sara De Freitas, director of the institution, and the assigned court admitted against her the alleged commission of the crime of minor intentional personal injury, in commission of omission.
All cases have prosecutors designated for the process. In the case of Caracas, Tarek William Saab appointed the Prosecutor’s Office 117 of the Criminal System for the Responsibility of Adolescents in the Metropolitan Area of Caracas. On May 4, he announced that the 31st Prosecutor’s Office with jurisdiction over Adolescent Criminal Responsibility had been appointed to sanction students from Colegio Los Angelitos, in Maracaibo, Zulia state.
This succession of accusations has generated in teachers and educational personnel, a kind of fear of facing possible reprisals in the midst of situations that have not even been previously investigated.
“It is true that many teachers and schools do not have sufficient tools to deal with cases of bullying, but that does not mean that they are not attended to at all, and now much less with the fear that teachers and administrators can go to jail, when not even find out what the procedure to follow is,” says a teacher and educational psychologist who worked until 2019 at a school in El Paraíso, in Caracas.
The educator adds that it is being considered only from the sanction, criminalizing, without considering that the school has been very neglected in terms of tools necessary to handle the problem. “You have to ask yourself, how many schools have educational psychologists or professionals with the capacity to deal with these cases? If the same officials of the NNA Protection System work with limitations, and in extreme cases, teachers do not have the support or attention of the parents who are directly responsible in this situation. Before judging that the school does nothing, ask how many times parents or representatives are summoned and they don’t even show up».
digital lynching
Discussing these issues in the midst of the debate – often hostile – that is generated through social networks implies another factor that complicates the problem: in all cases it is about children and adolescents.
According to figures from Cecodap’s psychological care service during 2021, 25% of young people said they had suffered from bullying and that so far this year they have treated 20 adolescent patients, of whom 17 have suffered or are suffering from bullying.
Luisa Pernalete, a Fe y Alegría educator dedicated to the work of Coexistence and Citizenship, explained that the law is not “merely punitive” and that the problem must be analyzed to identify causes and prevent.
“You cannot publish a law that is merely punitive because pure punishment will not solve the problem. Of course you have to protect the victim and admonish the perpetrator, but it cannot be just to punish. You have to be very careful with this law because the ideal is to work on solving problems peacefully,” said Pernalete.
Another factor is raised by the teacher and psychopedagogue who worked in a school in El Paraíso, according to the experience she faced when dealing with two cases of bullying in the institution: «Taking this to the terrain of good and bad, of adults against children is very dangerous, considering that the message and the solution that is sent from home is that violence is resolved with violence. If we are honest, what do we tell our children? If they hit you, you hit him. What if in those videos we are only seeing the reaction of someone who has been a victim? What if it is my son or my daughter who hits because she complied with what she was told at home? », She points out.
And he adds that the background of the problem remains unaddressed. “Violence does not come out of nowhere. Inside an aggressor child there is a child who has been attacked. And at school we’re just looking at the trigger. The school is there to train, so that children feel safe and now the response that we see from the State is not prevention, but in itself a threat ».
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