The Minister of National Education believes that “the fact of having experienced insults has forged something” in him.
The Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, who has made the fight against school bullying one of his priorities, said on Sunday November 5 that he himself had suffered this harassment when he was a teenager. “I was at the end of middle school, I was 14, 15 years old. It was a student from the establishment who had opened this site on which you had to post comments on the students’ physiques”explained the minister in the program “Sept à Huit”, on TF1.
“And I, on this occasion, experienced a flood of insults and insults. It lasted several months and it was very violent”described the 34-year-old minister.
“The comments that were posted were ‘faggot, tafiole, tarlouze’, so I think it was about a supposed sexual orientation at the time since I didn’t talk about it around me.”
Gabriel Attal, Minister of National Educationon TF1
“If I am so keen to get involved in school bullying, it is perhaps because the fact of having experienced insults has shaped something”insisted Gabriel Attal.
“Several dozen” of harassing students have changed establishments since the start of the school year
Since the summer, the government has announced a series of measures against bullying at school, including the possibility of changing schools for harassing students. According to Gabriel Attal, “several dozen (…) had to change establishments because they were harassing a friend”. The National Assembly, as part of the examination of National Education appropriations in the 2024 budget, adopted on Friday evening an amendment providing for the allocation of 30 million euros to the creation of anti-harassment brigades within academies.
Born to a father from a family of Jewish origin and an Orthodox Russian Christian mother, the minister also indicated on TF1 that he had received “letters, insults, messages on social networks” of an anti-Semitic nature, other threatening letters since the ban on the abaya and still being the target of homophobic attacks. He claims to have “really forged a shell over all that”.