There are plenty of forums where adults sit down to talk about children's education, but very few where children's voices are actually heard. As part of a larger project to improve integration in Europe's schools, the British Council recently conducted research into school bullying, giving teachers practical tools and guidelines to help them tackle the challenges of changing populations.

The research was conducted in 47 schools across Europe with significant numbers of immigrant students. Some 3,500 kids, aged between 13 and 16, explained how and when they have been made fun of at school. The results of the study were recently presented at the European Parliament by eight teenagers - including one from Spain - who gave European MPs "a real lesson," in the words of the project director, Mark Levy.

The study revealed that 32 percent of children have felt bullied at one time or another because of differences relating to their skin colour, language difficulties, religion or physical appearance. On the ranking of European countries, Spain is below the average with 22 percent of teenagers, or one out of five, feeling bullied, while Britain was at the top of the list with 48 percent. The Netherlands was at the bottom, with only 16 percent of students reporting this type of situation.

Rosario Ortega Ruiz, a professor of psychology at Córdoba University and an expert on school bullying, says that the reason Britain is at the top of the list is because there are many more immigrants living there - 17 percent of British students were foreign according to 2004 statistics, versus 11.8 percent in Spain last year. But Lorence Vos, the coordinator of the British schools that participated in the British Council project, says the difference is due mainly to lower tolerance for discrimination in Britain compared with Spain.

"Attitudes that are considered no more than jokes in Spain are considered insults and not funny at all in Britain," says Vos. "The perception of harassment has a significant cultural element to it."

Ortega Ruiz says that in Spain, the last few years have been marked by a decline in general bullying and an increase in race-based bullying as well as cyberbullying - assaulting a classmate and capturing it on camera to share it with friends later. A study she participated in called Bullying versus cultural bullying, conducted among 850 students in Córdoba, found that "students who are in the cultural minority were more likely to be the victims of bullying and showed greater emotional damage than their colleagues who were part of the cultural majority."

[March 2008]

[Copyright El Pais / MARUXA RUIZ DEL ÁRBOL 2008]