BERTRAND GUAY / AFP
Gabriel Attal speaks about the academic harassment he suffered at school (Photo by Gabriel Attel, Minister of National Education)
SCHOOL HARASSMENT – The Minister of Education Gabriel Attal, who has made the fight against school bullying one of his priorities, said on Sunday 5 that he himself had suffered “a flood of insults and insults” has “the end of college”.
“I was at the end of middle school, I was 14, 15 years old. It was a student of the establishment who had opened this site on which it was necessary to post comments on the physical appearance of the students”explained the minister in the show “Seven to Eight” on TF1.
“And I, on this occasion, experienced a flood of insults and insults. It lasted several months and it was very violent”he described.
“There is an end to suffering”
“The comments that were posted were “pedal, tafiole, tarlouze”, so I think it was about a supposed sexual orientation at the time since I didn’t talk about it around me”continued the 34-year-old minister, who studied at the renowned Alsatian School in Paris.
“What was hard for me, but what is also hard for many young people today, is sometimes the feeling that we have no one to talk to about it”he observed, saying he felt “suffering”.
“If I am so keen to get involved in school bullying, it is perhaps because the fact of having experienced insults has shaped something”insisted Gabriel Attal, who wants to send the message that“There is an end to suffering”.
Forge ” a shell »
Since the summer, the government has announced a series of measures against bullying at school, including the possibility of changing schools for harassing students. According to Gabriel Attal, “several dozen (…) had to change establishments because they were harassing a friend”.
The National Assembly, as part of the examination of National Education appropriations in the 2024 budget, adopted on Friday evening an amendment providing for the allocation of 30 million euros to the creation of anti-harassment brigades within academies.
Born to a father from a family of Jewish origin and an Orthodox Russian Christian mother, the minister also indicated on TF1 that he had received “letters, insults, messages on social networks” of an anti-Semitic nature, other threatening letters since the ban on the abaya and still being the target of homophobic attacks. He claims to have “really forged a shell over all that”.
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