The most disturbing thing about the case that shakes the Almirante Guise Naval High School that we discussed yesterday in these pages is not only its crudeness, but the naturalness with which it could have occurred. Last Tuesday, a 16-year-old student was the victim of a sexual assault committed by his own classmates inside a bus that was taking them back from a sports competition. Two coaches were in the vehicle. Nobody, it is said, noticed anything. Hard to believe.
The most disturbing thing about the case that shakes the Almirante Guise Naval High School that we discussed yesterday in these pages is not only its crudeness, but the naturalness with which it could have occurred. Last Tuesday, a 16-year-old student was the victim of a sexual assault committed by his own classmates inside a bus that was taking them back from a sports competition. Two coaches were in the vehicle. Nobody, it is said, noticed anything. Hard to believe.
Such an event did not come out of nowhere. It is the most visible tip of a violence that is growing in the sight of everyone and that the authorities contemplate with a parsimony that is already negligence. Between January and August, SíseVe counted 1,183 reports of sexual violence among schoolchildren: 77 of them classified as rape, that is, one every three days. Seven out of ten cases occur in secondary school; the cycle that should precisely form and protect.
The figure is neither new nor exceptional. In 2024, 185 sexual violations were recorded among students and 181 the following year. We are not, therefore, facing an isolated rebound, but rather a constant that repeats itself with the patience of the chronic. The State responds late, when there has already been a victim, without prevention that deserves that name; Schools, meanwhile, detect little, communicate late and sometimes prefer not to see.
What is striking – and what is unacceptable – is the little attention that the country pays to this phenomenon. Each complaint provokes a brief shudder and then silence, until the next tragedy. Bullying and harassment are not playground pranks: they are the breeding ground for events that lead to barbarism. That a school, and even two adults on board a bus, have not been able to prevent or warn what happened demonstrates the extent to which prevention continues to be a promise without content.
The demand does not allow delay. Real prevention protocols are needed, vigilant adults in each activity and, above all, the will to sanction without nuances those who looked the other way. A student who suffers sexual abuse on a school bus is not a statistic: it is the price we pay for an abandonment that we cannot continue to sustain.
