The pandemic marked a before and after. Isolation was not free and the effects it generated on society are seen to this day. Or, indeed, the effects are just beginning to be seen clearly. The thing is that, according to experts, despite the certainty that the pandemic is over – through vaccination – the internal look is missing, the pause for the question.
And, of course, the echoes are seen in schools, where cases of bullying and violence are becoming more frequent. This is what the Psychology graduate assures Claudia Moggia, who details that, after the virtuality imposed by isolation, the aspect of digital harassment increased. In addition, he points out that there was also an expansion in ages: now cases of bullying are registered in kindergartens.
«It’s something that’s been seen since the pandemic. The insults, the bad words from kids who didn’t say them before. Talking insults all the time and naturalizing it. There is a lot about how each one could manage, or not, in that isolation,» he warns Page|12 the specialist in childhood and adolescence and coordinator of the Violence in Schools Research Project.
The effects of the pandemic on children and adolescents
For Moggia, this is because there are those who think that the pandemic has already passed, but “«The consequences it left will last for many years.»
«Was suicides and suicide threats in boys who were not going to commit suicide, but they said it as a way of not wanting to know anything more about what was happening at that moment. Boys that you would never have imagined would come out that way,» laments the creator of the Consequences Foundation.
Along these lines, he remembers a case: «The excuse was something minimal, like the girl he liked said no to him. But the background was isolation, how that affected everyone subjectively.. Practices exploded after the pandemic. «We received many more calls,» he says.
The numbers of bullying
Putting bullying into numbers is not easy. This is data that is not easily quantifiable. In any case, and especially in research spaces, trends do set. Like when in Violence in Schools Research Project They share experiences.
“80 percent of people with a disability say they have suffered bullying at some point in your life. On the part of classmates and teachers, although we cannot classify that as bullying, because it is not something between peers. Before the pandemic this number was lower,» continues Moggia, while highlighting that the number of cases also grew in people without disabilities.
Meanwhile, according to a recent report by the civil organization Observatory of Argentines for Educationonly 2.8% of authorities consider that problems of coexistence between students are «a serious problem», while the 74.5% of students recognize situations of discrimination in the school environment.
The report shows that for 4 out of 10 secondary school principals (39%) coexistence between students «is not a serious problem.» For their part, 17% believe that it is a “moderate problem” and 41.2% consider that it is “a minor problem.”
Putting it into words and the false exit from bullying
This lack of putting into words and the complications when it came to assuming the remains of the pandemic had a great impact on the classrooms. “The positions of victims and perpetrators are mobile. Deep down, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? The one who harasses is a victimizer, because he does it for a reason,” says Moggia.
And he adds: «In general, what one attacks in the other who is supposed to be weaker is the weakness that oneself has and which one does not want to encounter. One attacks something very intimate about oneself that is not recognized by oneself”.
Thus, he points out, what the Spanish psychoanalyst José Ramón Ubieto baptized as the “false way out of bullying.” «There are ways to get out of adolescence. Each person has to see how they manage to make that passage. Recover a little from parental authority, separate themselves from that, begin to have their own autonomy, their own desire. And sometimes this is very difficult due to the time.”explains Moggia.
And he goes deeper: “Because there is no time to understand what happened in the pandemic. We entered, we are supposed to have already left, and all the analysis of what happened in the middle is missing. That is being done now. In adolescence, in this time where everything is so fast, there is no time to understand what happened in the passage between childhood and adolescence. In this, a false exit can be bullying.”
Therefore, the specialist concludes, the importance of power accompany to children and adolescents at this time, to help the reflection about what happened, the putting into wordsthe codes of behavior written by themselves and the staging of situations that can generate friendly instances of conflict resolution.