Marina Artusa
03/22/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
World
Updated 03/22/2021 6:00 AM
Camila says yes, this time she wants to talk.
She is 14 years old, with white-painted nails and bushy, arched eyelashes.
When she was 13, a court recognized her as "anxiety, fear, low self-esteem, nightmares, social problems, mistrust"
caused by racist bullying
.
The judge found the Community of Madrid responsible, for the first time in Spain, for the lack of action of the school where Camila attended primary school.
“As a mother, the recognition of Justice healed me, in part.
The fight was not in vain.
It created a precedent.
It is a sentence that until now has never been given
.
Racist bullying, that is, based on the victim's skin color.
That everything we have been through is recognized is healing, it helps.
But we have a long process left, ”
Petra Ferreyra, Camila's mother, from Argentina
, tells
Clarín
, who has spent years living with different nuances of discrimination.
Because she had to suffer it in her own flesh when, at 9, her family left Argentina to settle in Spain, where she became the “sudaca” babe.
Or when, in Madrid, she fell in love with Leo,
that black Dominican high school classmate
with whom she started a family: they married when they were about to turn 18 and had two daughters, Camila, 14, and Noemí, 9 .
Camila was a victim of racism and won a lawsuit against the community of Madrid.
Photo: Cezaro De Luca
They live in the Pilar neighborhood, one of the urban centers that in the 80s had the highest population density in Europe: the monoblocks housed about 235 people per hectare.
The highest grossing school in the neighborhood - and one of the most sought after in Madrid - is Cardenal Herrera Oria,
where going to class became a torment for Camila.
“They blamed her.
They told him at school that he didn't know how to defend himself.
It was very cruel, ”says
Petra.
The insults and contempt for Camila's skin color or curly hair that Cardinal Herrera Oria tried to minimize as a
“boy thing”
cost the school principal her job, a single court ruling against the Community of Madrid and
the payment of compensation of 7,500 euros to the family.
“It translated into a ridiculous financial sum.
We are still waiting for moral reparation
, a letter in which they admit the damage they caused to my daughter, but the law of silence reigns ”, laments Petra.
“He left the exams on target, he didn't concentrate.
He repeated
”, Petra lists the ordeal of the adolescent who is currently in the second year of ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education).
The judgment of the Contentious-Administrative Court number 34 of the Community of Madrid affirmed that “neither the center's management nor even the teachers, inquired about what was really happening,
trying to relativize the problem to things of children
, qualified, in the act of sight, as 'normal punctual events within the school' ”.
“I don't like talking about Camila as a 'victim'.
She is a survivor who can now help other children to know how to cope, ”says her mother.
Petra Ferreyra, mother of Camila who was a victim of racism and won a lawsuit against the community of Madrid.
Photo: Cezaro De Luca
And she explains why she and her husband decided to take Camila's suffering to court: “It was emotionally exhausting and we wanted to show that
a situation that should not be normalized should not be normalized,” she
says.
We had the duty and the commitment, as parents and as a family, to try to show that what had happened was not normal, once the scope and magnitude of the damage towards Camila was seen on a psychological level.
There was a more profound consequence than we realized.
Things happened that we didn't even know. "
In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed
March 21 the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
.
He did so not to forget that on that day in 1960, South African police fired on a peaceful demonstration and killed 69 people demonstrating against the apartheid pass law in Sharpeville, South Africa.
Petra and Camila are encouraged to tell their own story of pain caused by xenophobia in Spain and recommend, so that other families do not live the ordeal that they were touched by skin color:
"Let them talk, to say what is to
them happening at school,
”Camila says.
Children have to talk.
Do not remain silent because sometimes that not speaking becomes a very big ball ”.
"It is also important that parents listen to their children," adds Petra.
It tends to normalize, to minimize, to say: 'You will have done something to make that happen to you'. "
Along with other moms who suffer from racial bullying, Petra founded the Suspenso al Racismo (@suspensoracismo) platform:
"To make visible
and viralize what many children experience," she explains.
The cases
Six months after the sentence that condemned the Community of Madrid for not having prevented Camila from being attacked because of the color of her skin, the Madrid Minister of Education and Youth, Enrique Ossorio, released the IV Annual Report on Coexistence and Harassment School.
According to the official study, in July 2020 Madrid
had reduced
reported
cases
of bullying
by 60 percent
thanks to its plan to eradicate it in the classrooms.
And that the number of cases reported in the Educational Inspection had fallen from 179 registered in the 2015/16 academic year, to 105 recorded in the 2018/19 academic year.
“The general percentage of potential bullying has decreased in our region,
from 3 percent in the 2015/16 academic year to 1 percent in the 2018/19 academic year
, representing a decrease of 66.6 percent - says the report.
Of the cases detected by the Educational Inspection, in the 2018/2019 academic year, harassment occurred in physical spaces 86.67 percent of the time, while cyberbullying occurred in the remaining 13.33 percent.
Precisely, the Community of Madrid will not allow the use of mobile phones in the classrooms of schools and institutes. "
Petra Ferreyra, however, has another opinion: “The bullying protocol of the Community of Madrid indicates that in the profile of the passive victim one of the reasons for possible aggression is because it is different from the homogeneity of the group.
In these same words, what is done is not recognizing the heterogeneity of the group,
the diverse mix of ethnicities,
of genders ”, he says.
“Spain is quite behind in terms of racist bullying.
There are no actual statistics.
There is no legislation that protects the victims - he assures -.
The protocols are always in the hands of the educational centers, which are judge and party.
There is no objectivity. "
"At the level of protocols against racial bullying, the sentence has not changed anything," says Petra, with disappointment.
However, at home, indoors, Petra and her husband Leo celebrate that today, when Camila looks in the mirror, she can say: “I see a teenage girl
who as a child did not like her hair or her color
and that with the passage of time she has adapted to her way of being, she has begun to feel what she is like and now I think she is very well ”.
Madrid. Correspondent
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