Four years ago I published on these same pages an article on bullying entitled Because we allow it. It wasn’t the first text I wrote on the subject, which has always particularly horrified me. Him bullying In childhood and adolescence it is a sensational and close hell, a daily torture of whose existence we are all aware, even if, I don’t understand why, we seem to prefer to ignore it. Precisely for this reason it resists: because we allow it. And the case of Sandra, the 14-year-old girl from Seville who committed suicide after being subjected to long torment by three other girls, demonstrates this permissiveness: that Irish school in Loreto which does not activate the protocols and which as I write has not yet taken on sufficient responsibility, those networks that no one controls and which infinitely multiply the torture of the victims.
A 2023 survey by the NGO Educo.org concluded that 30% of boys and girls aged 12 to 17 suffered from bullying. That is almost one in three. Since, according to the INE, in our country there are approximately five million children between the ages of 10 and 19, this means, with a rough and low estimate, that at this moment there are at least one million minors subjected to daily torture, anguished and crying secretly at night, terrified of having to go to class every day. And we’re only halfway through the first school term. That pain and humiliation is deeply destructive. They can kill, as in the case of Sandra (more than a suicide it is a murder), and in any case they leave terrible scars, sometimes insurmountable traumas that will mark the entire lives of these children. Every year, when the course begins, I think of them. In the multitude of creatures who will face suffering. Damn the system that allows this, damn the institutions, damn the schools, damn the parents who don’t pay enough attention (not just if their child is tortured, but if their child is a torturer), damn us all. It is incomprehensible and unacceptable that this hell on Earth cannot be fought.
Having said this, I would add that, paradoxically, Sandra’s tragedy has given me some hope again. It is by no means the first suicide due to bullying in Spain. I remember, for example, Jokin (14 years old), who fell from a cliff in Hondarribia in 2004 after two long cycles of torture; or Carla (also 14 years old), who in 2013 threw herself off another cliff in Gijón, tortured by two companions; or Arancha (16 years old), with an intellectual and motor disability, who in 2015 jumped from a sixth floor in Madrid after suffering brutal beatings and blackmail from a classmate in front of everyone’s eyes, who had done nothing. Or Diego (11 years old), who also in Madrid and in 2015 jumped from the fifth floor. To name a few. But never before a suicidebullying had caused such a stir, such a lasting and profound scandal. I have a feeling that Sandra might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the drama that causes structural change, the Ana Orantes of bullying. I remember very well the courageous Ana, so pretty with her sweet, smiling face and her concrete hair from a neighborhood hairdresser, who denounced on television in 1997 the brutal abuse she had suffered for four decades at the hands of her ex-husband, from whom she had managed to separate the previous year. A few days after the program aired, the monster killed her by burning her alive. This atrocity marked a before and after in the social perception of gender violence and gave rise to a cascade of laws and measures. Women continued to die (and some were burned alive, like Ana), but the situation has undoubtedly improved. Because things change if you really want to change them. A very interesting study on bullying carried out in 2023 by the ColaCao Foundation and the Complutense University concluded that 6.2% of students (almost 220,000) said they had suffered bullying in the last two months, both in person and online, and that 20.4% (more than 44,000 victims) had at some point attempted to take their own life. And they added a chilling fact: 17% of face-to-face bullies and 25% of cyberbullies have also attempted suicide. I mean, there’s a lot of suffering to deal with, a lot of wounds to cauterize, a lot of work to do. Let’s get to the point.
