Kyriakos Mitsotakis presents the national campaign against school violence

The national strategy and information campaign to combat school violence and bullying are currently being presented at the 3rd highschool of Polichni, in the presence of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, with the escalation of penalties up to and including the permanent expulsion of the student from school.

The Prime Minister stated, “I urge you to break the silence, and this concerns not only the victims but also the bystanders. It’s not courage to beat someone up or to ridicule them for the choices they make. If the perpetrator feels isolated, that’s the first step. If we find a way to isolate these behaviors and say that there are rules and boundaries, which when exceeded, have consequences.

It’s a problem that concerns parents, teachers’ associations, and the church. The first important step is for someone to be able to speak up. It’s not easy to talk about the perpetrator. It’s not easily acceptable to talk about the perpetrator, but it’s necessary. Our platform gives us the ability to recognize the incident. It gives us the opportunity for anonymous reporting and to utilize the tools at our disposal. The effectiveness will be judged by the effective management of the reports that will be made. Protocols are procedures proposed by experts to manage them in the best possible way.

But now we are not only concerned about the number of incidents but also the intensity of the violence with which the bullying occurs, which is not only physical but can also be cyber and psychological.”

The Education Minister in his statement mentioned that, “the first step is the awareness campaign, which aims not only to present a video but also calls on all of you to speak up, express your thoughts, condemn violence in schools, and we must do this for our children.”

Presenting the stop-bullying.gov.gr platform, he said that, among other things, it includes recording systems and management systems. It is a platform for reporting incidents both by parents and students with codes in the nationwide school network, including descriptions of the type of abuse, whether physical, cyber, psychological, etc.

After submitting the report, there is monitoring of how quickly the incident is managed, added the Minister of Education.

Initially, the school takes over the management, but depending on the severity of the case, there is a 4-member committee of experts at the secondary education directorate, while there is also a committee of experts at the Ministry of Education, Mr. Pierakakis added.

In this context, he announced even greater support in the number of psychologists, which have already increased from 2,000 to 4,000, while he described the training that will follow in the coming months for educators.

“We must cultivate a culture of social contract, acceptance, and respect for culture. That is why from September we are incorporating Active Citizen actions from Kindergartens to the first year of highschools,” the Minister of Education further stated. The goal, as he said, is for this to happen one hour per week throughout the school year.

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