Where do the prejudices that hurt LGTB minors so much come from? Why are the group that suffers the most bullying in the classrooms? What are the administrations doing about it and what are we fathers and mothers doing so that our children are never part, neither as actors nor as spectators, of any type of harassment? Too many questions with few blunt answers.
To this day, precisely commemorating LGBT Pride Day, we continue to suffer some figures that hurt: More than half of LGBT children suffer bullying in classrooms and more than a third of these children have attempted suicide because of the harassment. It would be good if we all started acting as soon as possible.
The figures should have made us react long ago, when we first read that More than half of LGBT children have suffered or suffer bullying in classrooms.
We are talking about several thousand children throughout the country who live a life full of fear, pressure, violence and prejudice. One alone would be something unjustified but thousands, it is something that escapes the logic of a society that is supposed to fight for the equality of its members, of all its members.
Sexual orientation is the first cause of attacks in schools according to all studies and statistics. To the point that many of those children, of those harassed children, end up taking their own lives as it happened to Alan, a 17-year-old transsexual boy, who suffered harassment caused him to commit suicide on December 24.
There are no official figures that relate the suicide of minors with their sexual condition, in fact it is sometimes the family itself that denies that relationship when suicide has occurred due to the tremendous pain of facing so much suffering.
Associations and groups do get that data through friends, neighbors and the child's environment that recognizes that circumstance. The State Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals does not have a single report of bullying on these groups but does draw certain conclusions from the analysis of different studies.
A hostile environment
The school environment for LGBT minors can be very hostile as soon as the harassment occurs because they don't receive the necessary support On the part of the educational system that as indicated by all the groups that address this issue, their actions are far behind society in terms of integration.
It is not easy to detect but perhaps everything that could or should not be done about it by the administration is being done, first to prevent these situations and then to intervene effectively when they occur.
For example, there are cases such as that of a transsexual girl in Malaga in which it was the center where she was studying, a concerted school, which exerted pressure for the girl to leave the center since she did not consider her condition acceptable. These are situations that should not occur in a society that advocates and bets for the equality of all its members, of all, without distinction.
It is very sad to read thoughts full of pain and sincerity, as we were talking about almost a year ago about a child with problems of self-esteem and the feeling of feeling rejected by the fact of being homosexual
From the State Federation and together with other associations and groups, a project is being drafted that serves as a framework to regulate the treatment that transsexuals should receive from childhood, the treatment they need for their personal development as members of an integrating society, something that they are not receiving now and that sometimes makes even the families themselves not know how to act.
Small gestures to prevent
Perhaps that normalization and introduction of gay characters in consumer products such as children's films, helps many children understand that there is no reason to discriminate against anyone.
Perhaps the reading of books and stories is also a way of normalizing from small both the possible assaulted minors and those who could become aggressors or passive spectators.
Inform us as fathers and mothers to inform our children when the first symptoms of our child suffer bullying or even that our child exercises or participates in that bullying begin to occur. Preventing it from happening through information and tolerance is the best we can do for themselves.
And talk, talk to them, talk, listen to them because what can be a novelty to which they put barriers and create roughness, we as fathers and mothers, we can make it nothing more than a difference, such as that of the red-haired boy or the girl blonde, a feature without more meaning for fluid and positive coexistence.
