Back to school doesn't just mean hugging teachers and classmates again.
For many students, it also means
coming back to dealing with bullying
.
Only considering the last months of the last school year, in fact, as many as 1 pupil out of 5 tells of having suffered at least one of the many forms of abuse in which the phenomenon takes place.
This was reported by the "Bullying and Cyberbullying" Observatory, conducted by Skuola.net in collaboration with Citroën Italy, interviewing 3,000 girls and boys between 11 and 19 years of age as part of the “Respect ME” project.
The aim of the research is precisely to draw up a balance of the phenomenon at the end of the first year of systematic return to class attendance, being precisely
school is the environment where bullying and cyberbullying are most frequent
.
Unfortunately, even if only considering a relatively short period such as the last quarter of lessons, 13% of the teenagers interviewed "reported" having been the victim of occasional episodes, while for 7% it was systematic harassment.
Because there are bullying matrices that are much more frequent than others.
Which ones are they?
Those that focus mainly on
three major macro-areas: appearance, sexual identity, ethnicity or origin
.
The so -called
"body shaming"
- which aims to underline, for disparaging purposes, physical defects or, even worse, any disabilities - is by far the most exploited by bullies.
In second place in this not very honorable ranking, we find sexual orientation.
Thirdly, racist prejudices.
Not only.
Bullying, for some "categories" of Zedders, becomes even more pressing and present in everyday life.
From the point of view of age,
pre-adolescents and young adolescents in particular end up in the crosshairs of bullies:
in the 11-16 age group, on average 22% of the sample has been a victim in recent months;
then, as you grow up, luckily the numbers start to go down.
But, sometimes, it's the "gender" that can make a big difference, for better or for worse.
Females, for example, are much more exposed to "body shaming" than males: about 1 in 3 girls have recently been affected by this type of attack, while among boys the frequency drops to 1 in 6. Even worse, if possible, is the condition of those young people who do not recognize themselves in the traditional male-female gender binomial.
The girls and boys who define themselves as "non-binary", in fact, are the most harassed of all.
From every point of view: as many as 4 out of 10 have been bullied because of their sexual orientation, over a third (35%) have at least been mocked for their physical appearance.
Laying the foundations for a truly complicated adolescence.
And, as if that were not enough, on the horizon, especially in the digital sphere, new forms of harassment appear which, more or less subtly, can have a negative impact on the psyche of those who suffer them.
One of these is the so-called
"orbiting"
, that is the practice that sees
a sort of external control on one's social channels by a former partner
r - without any direct communication but merely commenting or leaving reactions - after the end of the romantic relationship: despite being a behavior codified only recently, 35% of the young people involved in the research have already been victims of it.
Causing consequences to be monitored, in particular upset (in almost 3 out of 10 cases), anger (in 1 in 4) and sadness (in 1 in 5).
Less than half (42%), on the other hand, claim that they have not been “touched” by it in any way.
Here too, needless to say, the "categories" most affected are girls and "non-binaries".
In any case, they fared better than those who have to undergo an even more invasive interference in the private sphere, which takes the form of the circulation on the web - without their consent - of intimate materials, often extorted, by a partner.
“Non consensual sharing”,
one of the most annoying manifestations of the wider “
revenge porn
”: although still a teenager, 14% of the interviewees (1 out of 7) have come across it at least once.
A figure that practically doubles among those who recognize themselves in non-binary gender identities: 27% of them have experienced this "aggression" of their intimacy at least once in their life.
“The pandemic has not given us back better versions of ourselves, as many hoped for.
Our teenagers continue to be plagued by bullying that yes, it has always existed, but that through the digital dimension, in which we are all immersed, manages to be even more "effective"
.
The school, a place where many relationships between peers are born, is certainly one of the environments in which these phenomena are most likely to arise.
But it is the same in which they can be eradicated, as long as students and teachers receive constant training in this regard ”, says Daniele Grassucci, director of Skuola.net.
Actively promoting, in schools and among students, the culture of respect as a tool to combat deviant phenomena connected with bullying is the basis of the Respect ME project.
One of the key steps is back to school 2022: we start with a pilot project that will involve about 500 students of Secondary Schools who, once their classes have been "debilitated", will subsequently become ambassadors of a communication campaign against bullying and cyberbullying, online and "in the field", which expects to reach at least half a million teenagers on Skuola.net and on their respective social channels.
In fact, in each class involved will be appointed reference students for the fight against bullying, who will have the task of assisting their teachers in the constant monitoring of the phenomenon,