It’s a new game and it is designed to stop school bullying in its tracks. Hot on the heels of another bullying tragedy – the suicide of a 15-year-old who had endured months of misery meted out by classmates – 27-year-old social educator Cátia Vaz has come up with a board game that she has christened “A Brincar e a Rir o Bullying Vamos Prevenir” (Playing and Laughing, Bullying We Will Prevent).
It’s a game aimed at six to 12 year-olds, their parents, teachers, psychologists and social educators, and it will be released with an explanatory DVD.
Costing €39.98, the game is already mentioned in primary school Portuguese manuals.
Its author contends: “Bullying has always existed in schools, but it is only recently that it has been acknowledged. In the old days, it was seen as a simple ruckus between children.”
Her game, for which she has travelled up and down the country, visiting schools of all sorts, shouldn’t just stop bullying, she says, it hopes also to deal head-on with the whole issue of violence in schools.
Bullying reached a peak in Portugal a couple of years ago when a 12-year-old boy threw himself into the river Tua to escape schoolyard taunts. Since then, a number of organisations and initiatives have come to the fore, including the website bullyingescola.com, which estimates that “40% of children in Portugal suffer from this problem…”
In 2009, a study estimated that 40,000 youngsters in Portugal were subjected to bullying, either verbal or physical. The study concluded that bullying had “disastrous” consequences for the future of its victims, including eating disorders, unemployment, relationship problems, a fear of having children and a heightened suicide risk.
