Anti-bullying legislation approved by the Jalisco Congress defines bullying in state law for the first time and outlines prevention policies that school administrators are obliged to take.
“The spirit of the law is to prevent, sanction and eradicate bullying in schools,” said PRI legislator Rocio Corona, the promoter of the legislation.
Teachers must report any bullying incidents they witness to school administrators and may face discipline if they fail to act.
The reforms to the state education law define student-to-student aggression as being either physical, emotional or psychological.
Under the legislation all victims of bullying must receive psychological counseling, while perpetrators of bullying may be removed from schools.The law not only covers bullying on school grounds but also in the trajectory to and from students’s homes.
The Jalisco Department of Education has been instructed to draft the law’s reglamiento (complementary regulation code) that will further specify individual types of bullying.
Only two legislators abstained from approving the bill; both are former teachers who said the law is “a political escape valve” but inoperable in practice.
One out of every three students is a victim of some kind of bullying in local schools, according to University of Guadalajara investigator María Teresa Prieto.
A bullying hotline introduced in June 2011 received just 360 complaints in its first eight months, said Jalisco Education Secretary Antonio Gloria Morales. He said the relatively low number of calls to “01-800-13 me cuida” indicated that bullying was not as widespread in state schools as many people believe. He said 30 schools had been identified as having problems of this nature but action had been taken and that the bullying was “almost controlled.”