The Court of First Instance number 8 of Bilbao has sentenced the Nuestra Señora de Begoña charter school to pay 40,000 euros to a family for failing to act suffered by their daughter when she was 5 years old. In the 2021-2022 academic year, the girl suffered “constant physical and even sexual assaults,” intimidation and harassment by a classmate for months until her parents decided to change her center, according to the ruling published in The Mail.
The ruling establishes that the center did not do enough and that, as a result of these events, the victim temporarily lost her speech, suffered “intense social withdrawal” and “episodes of anxiety, insomnia and loss of appetite.” The resolution includes the story of the Osakidetza psychiatrist who treated the minor and who noted that she was “extraordinarily ill” with “a picture of severe post-traumatic stress as a reaction to a situation of mistreatment and abuse of a sexual nature.”
During the trial he also explained that the center “turned a deaf ear and eyes to the suffering” of the girl, to whom it prescribed anxiolytics to combat the condition she presented. Three years later, the minor continues to receive psychiatric treatment and medication. The family has moved to get away from the hell they experienced. The events occurred when the victim was in the third year of Kindergarten and the aggressor, a year older, began to harass her, hit her, take away her food, and even “sometimes broke into the bathroom to take off her pants when she was relieving herself and in Others introduced markers into her vagina,” according to the ruling.
The magistrate considers it proven that it was not an “isolated or punctual” situation; “It lasted at least from September 2021 to March 2022 without (the center) being able to articulate any solution that would put an end to it.” “There is no trace that any measure was arbitrated – or even considered – at any time,” the ruling argues, which highlights that “the center became a mere spectator.” “The evidence shows clearly and without a shadow of a doubt the failure of the center to resolve what happened and guarantee the protection of the minor,” the magistrate resolves.
