About 700,000 children and adolescents are victims of school bullying, or 5 to 6% of students in total, according to victimization surveys cited by the Ministry ofNational Education. The bill aimed at combating school harassment must be finally voted on by the deputies on February 24. The text creates an offense of school harassment which can be punished up to 10 years in prison in the event of suicide or attempted suicide of the victim.
To evoke this violence, daily for many, “Seconde 9”, the new section of “19/20” of France 3, invited Amina Frühauf, mother of the singer Bilal Hassani and author of Being a mother – Taha, Bilal and me (Michel Lafon editions) and Hugo Martinez, president of the Hugo association, who himself was the victim of harassment.
Hugo Martinez is one of those behind this law. As a child, for more than 10 years, he was bullied. The unpleasant nicknames, but also the beatings and humiliations on social networks… So many psychological shocks that undermined this student who was very advanced in primary school. Food has become his refuge, weight gain its corollary. With ever more vexations. Until he created the Hugo association to fight against harassment. He was then 18 years old and from Lyon began a fight that would free him. He is a young man sure of himself and inexhaustible on the subject sits in the armchairs of “Seconde 9”. “I am proud of this law, it is a personal fight”he confides.
AT his side, Amina Frühauf, the mother of the singer Bilal Hassani and his brother Taha, also victims of this destructive violence. The mother recounts the ordeal of the parents of harassed children. “If only a school for parents existed”she slips. “I saw them unhappy but I didn’t know what was going on”, says Amina Frühauf. Then comes the idea of “Sunday confessional”. Every week, she gathers her two children around the coffee table in the living room and offers them “to talk about everything and nothing”. AT load for her “to try to answer all their questions”.
Their speech is released. His children tell him about the vexations, the harassment… Because one, Taha, with hair “too much” curly or judged “too much” good with girls. Because the other, Bilal, is walking “like a girl” or dance to Britney Spears tunes in the playground. “It’s very difficult for a child to come home and tell his parents that we are being bullied”, explains the mother. His “stratagem”, as she calls it, works. His children confide. It remains to convey a message, his message: that of the freedom to live as one is.
“College students are confronted with what life is like, because in life there would be a box for everyone with criteria imposed by society, and very heteronormative. And you have to answer that because otherwise you will be attacked”, she laments. Hugo Martinez listens and adds: “The difference makes the world rich!” The young man insists on a crucial point in his eyes: “The harasser, too, must be able to express his discomfort, because in 9 cases out of 10 he is a harassed former student or he has in him a difference that he wants. hide. By exposing – in fact by harassing – someone else to live alone!” A behavior, he insists, that “has repercussions on building a family, work”.
Accompany the harassed, also rebuild the harassers, because the repercussions on entire lives are now known, documented: the law which will be proposed to the deputies next Thursday will go in this direction. The offense of harassment will also be accompanied by measures allowing better care and support. But Hugo Martinez obviously does not forget the harassed young people and their reconstruction which can go through support and a new self-awareness. By discovering new passions, cultural, sporting or otherwise. An alternative to violence for some, a means of rebuilding for others.