When bullied and made fun of by their schoolmates, Alana and Leila would fight back.
And, for doing so,
the school authorities punished them
.
“This is what I picked up in the town of Sallent itself: that they sometimes tried to defend themselves but that, at that time, they understood in high school that it was a 'quid pro quo' ('one thing for another'),
it
is to say, 'you do and they also do', but that they were punished more severely”, Carmen Cabestany, a teacher who chairs the Spanish association No Al Acoso Escolar (NACE), tells
Clarín
.
Cabestany participated on Tuesday afternoon in the march of silence that toured the streets of the town of 6,700 neighbors where the Argentine twins had lived since 2020 with their parents and their brother two years younger than them.
Behind a banner that read “
We want justice.
A warrior and an angel.
Alana and Leila
”, dozens of people asked to stop the bullying that caused what the Spanish now call
“the Sallent tragedy”
: the 12-year-old girls jumped into the void from a third floor.
Alana died when she fell.
Leila is still admitted to the Sabadell hospital, with a broken jaw, broken arms and a compromised lung.
Leila and Alana, the two Argentinean twins who jumped from a balcony in Barcelona tired of bullying at school.
According to the testimony of some students from the Llobregat de Sallent public school, where Alana and Leila were in their first year of secondary school, defending themselves from the attacks they suffered during school hours earned the twins a double punishment: hours of confinement in a frozen
room
.
And when the penance was extended to their attackers, Alana and Leila almost always got the worst of it.
“I learned of two punishments: leaving them alone in what they call 'the fridge' (the fridge), a very cold room.
And, on the other hand, expel them but for a longer time than they expelled the others”, says the president of the association that fights against bullying in Spain.
“This is what they told me.
That sometimes they were punished for six hours in 'the fridge'.
And that other times, they punished both parties, but some were punished less and they were expelled for a longer time ”, he details.
revictimization
"This is the revictimization of the victim," Cabestany defines it.
“Proceedings are not easy in cases of bullying.
We are under the law of silence, but we must try to clarify what we are facing, what has happened - he insists -.
And not only see the apparent.
Many times we see the tip of the iceberg but we don't see what's underneath.”
The case shocked Spain and Argentina.
@TribunaLibreES
The Sallent public school, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2019,
did not activate any anti-bullying protocol
.
The suffering of the twins in the classroom, apparently invisible to the school administration, became unbearable for them.
The specialist, however, does not hide her objections regarding the protocols that should be put into practice in cases of harassment.
“The protocol is a tool and it depends on who wields it.
With a hammer we can make Michelangelo's Moses.
Or we can destroy it,” she notes.
"In the face of bullying, we are dealing with abuse between equals, repeated over time, with the intention of causing harm, on the one hand, and generating defenselessness, on the other, which causes an imbalance of forces, an abuse of power," he defines. .
And he clarifies: "You have to know that not all victim profiles are the same, nor are all aggressor profiles."
“There is a profile of an active victim who can try to defend himself, although he will always fail.
Sometimes, at first, they do not defend themselves, but when the
aggression is repeated
, they generate inadequate defense systems that have no effect.
There are victims who try to get close to their victimizers, become their friends, bring them what they ask for (cigarettes, money) ”, he exemplifies.
"The fact that there were two of them, and sisters, could have caused them to feel protected by each other," is their guess.
It's not a boy's thing
“It would be necessary to carry out in-depth investigations and gain the trust of the witnesses, but this is laborious, it takes time.
To this is added that in schools, in general, it is not given too much importance because it is considered that they are things for boys.
And the result may end up being what happened with these girls”, laments Cabestany.
"It's not a boy's thing" is the name of the petition for signatures that José Manuel López Viñuela, father of Kira, a teenager who committed suicide due to bullying in 2021, registered on the Change.org platform for the Spanish Parliament to
approve
a anti-bullying law (change.org/NoEsCosaDeNiños).
He has already collected more than 250,000 signatures.
Says the president of NACE: “You have to know that the witnesses generally also say that nothing has happened.
Because they are threatened, because
the word 'snitch' (snitch) exists
.
Teachers don't usually see it and in the end the result of this protocol shows that it is not bullying.
Many times what they recognize is that there has been a conflict.
The difference is that the conflict is punctual and bullying needs the reiteration factor to be considered harassment or bullying”.
“We're late,” Cabestany laments, referring to Alana and Leila.
And he insists on the decalogue to eradicate bullying that the association he presides drew up: “We will not be able to bring this girl (Alana) back to life.
But with the decalogue we would have more guarantees to avoid tragedies”.
Among the main points of the decalogue is making bullying visible in educational centers "because what is not named does not exist" and incorporating emotional education from the kindergarten stage and working on emotions in a situation, and not theoretically.
Raise awareness and train teachers, including bullying in the Teaching, Pedagogy and Psychology curricula.
And also inform parents so that they are able to detect a possible case of abuse in their children (as victims or as perpetrators) and so that they can act correctly and quickly.
Madrid. Correspondent
MG
look also
Leila, the twin who wanted to accompany her sister until the end but did not want to die
Drama of the twins: the strong precedent of the Kira case in Barcelona and what the Justice said
