Bullying: you have to get serious at the first sign
This type of violence has been increasingly reported and needs attentive educators to avoid disastrous consequences.
Andréia Barros
Among the many challenges that already exist in the school routine, there is another one. School bullying - a term without exact translation into Portuguese - has been increasingly reported. It is a type of aggression that can be physical or psychological, occurs repeatedly and intentionally, and ridicules, humiliates and intimidates its victims. "Nobody knows how to act", sentences the prosecutor Soraya Escorel, who makes up the organizing committee of the 1st Paraiba Seminar on Bullying School, which brought together educators, legal professionals and government representatives on March 28 and 29, in João Pessoa, at Paraíba. "Schools usually omit themselves. Parents don't know how to handle it correctly. Victims and witnesses remain silent. The big challenge is to call everyone to work to encourage a culture of peace and respect for individual differences," she adds.
From the serious cases, the subject started to gain space in studies developed by pedagogues and psychologists who deal with Education. For Lélio Braga Calhau, State Attorney of Minas Gerais, the press also helped to give visibility to the importance of fighting bullying and, consequently, crime. "We are not dealing here with small games typical of childhood, but with cases of violence, in many cases in a veiled way. These moral or even physical aggressions can cause psychological damage to children and adolescents later facilitating their entry into the world of crime", assesses the expert on the subject. He agrees that bullying encourages delinquency and induces other forms of overt violence.
Seminar - Organized by the Prosecutor's Office for Children and Adolescents of Paraíba, in partnership with the municipal and state governments and with support from the Colégio Motiva, the event aimed, in addition to debating the subject, to guide Education and Judiciary professionals on how to deal with this problem. The Public Prosecutor's Office made a request to add cases of bullying to Dial 100, a national number created to report crimes against children and adolescents. The document will be sent to the Ministry of Justice and the Special Secretariat for Human Rights.
During the meeting, a publication was also launched to be distributed to schools in Paraíba, with the aim of highlighting the importance of of educational work in all scenarios where bullying may be present - at school, in the workplace or even between neighbors. In this manual, the most common symptoms of victims of this type of aggression are presented, some clues on how to identify the aggressors, advice for parents and teachers on how to prevent this type of situation and the consequences for those involved are also shown.
In partnership with the Mauritius University of Nassau, the event organizers recorded the lectures and discussions - the material will be transformed into an educational video-documentary that will be shown in schools in Paraíba, Bahia and Pernambuco.
Available in School Magazine. Accessed on 4/16/15.
