In Dortmund, a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten by a gang of girls. Now the mother is making serious accusations against the school for not protecting her daughter sufficiently. “This is not an isolated case; bullying and violence are bitter everyday occurrences for several thousand students,” warns violence prevention expert Carsten Stahl.
These video recordings are shocking: 15-year-old Laura is beaten up in a girls’ bathroom at a secondary school in Dortmund by five girls of a similar age. They brutally pull Laura’s long hair from all sides, causing her to scream. They grab her face with their hands, repeatedly punch her in the head and side, and kick her bent-over upper body from below. The perpetrators grab their victim by her clothes and try to push the girl towards the ground.
14 seconds of an attack that was clearly planned and deliberately filmed, accompanied by the comment “I did it better this time”. Four days before the attack that took place on January 16th at the “Robert Koch Secondary School” in Dortmund, there had already been a smaller one on a staircase in the school building. Videos have also appeared in chat groups in which perpetrators make fun of the victim and boast about their actions.
Laura* had only started secondary school at the beginning of the year because of a spontaneous change of school. The bullying problems began immediately, and a group of around seven girls were ultimately involved, Laura’s mother explained to FOCUS online on the phone. It was a teacher who finally put an end to the attack on her daughter in the girls’ bathroom on January 16th. But what happened next still leaves her speechless.
“Instead of calling the police and taking my daughter, who had been beaten bloody, to a hospital, she was left alone in a room with a bleeding face for half an hour, where she was supposed to write a report of the attack on her. And this despite the fact that she was completely distraught at the time and the perpetrators were lurking outside the room and causing a ruckus.” Her daughter was told to “wash her face, lie down, put a little ointment on her skin and then she would be fine,” Laura’s mother continued.
The same day, the mother filed a criminal complaint against the girls’ gang with the police. And after a second conversation with the school administration, which took place at the beginning of February, she even had hope that the situation could change.
“The headmaster promised me that they would make sure that the bullying and violence against Laura would stop.” In addition, the police even held a threat assessment with those affected after Laura found out that she was going to be beaten up again. In addition, some students were temporarily suspended.
But according to Laura’s mother, this did not change the aggressive behavior of the girl gang towards her daughter.
Laura’s mother then reacted with horror again when the “Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” (WAZ), which first reported on the case in May, asked the school principal for a statement on the allegations.
Instead of answering the request directly, the Arnsberg district government, as the responsible school supervisory authority, took a position, writes the WAZ. The authority assured that the school had “met” several times with various committees “after the first events became known in January”. Various “disciplinary measures” were issued, “additionally” flanked by “various educational measures”. And all of these reactions were found to be “appropriate, proportionate and suitable” according to the district government “in order to make the students aware of their serious behavior and to prevent similar behavior in the future”.
“But how,” asks Laura’s mother, “can this be, when the bullying had continued until recently and only a few weeks later there had been another brutal attack on Laura?” On March 19, Laura was pushed into a corner by schoolgirls during a five-minute break and beaten so badly that she suffered a traumatic brain injury and a compression of the abdomen.
Laura’s mother continues that she received no answer to her repeated inquiries to the school administration as to the reason for her daughter’s subsequent “reprimand for several days”. “It was obviously because the principal believed the perpetrators that my daughter had started the fight.”
The mother has now found a new school for her daughter. But that is not the end of the matter for her. “My daughter is afraid to go out, the lightness of life has disappeared. And of course she did not have the strength to concentrate on learning as much as she would have under normal circumstances.” Laura’s mother has also hired a lawyer and filed a complaint with the district government.
Laura’s mother also receives support from anti-bullying and anti-violence expert Carsten Stahl, whom Laura’s mother herself asked for support. “Many head teachers are afraid to speak out publicly about bullying and violence in their schools. On the one hand, because they are worried about being stigmatized as a ‘problem school’, and on the other hand, because they fear losing their jobs if they speak out,” Stahl told FOCUS online.
This is fatal, stresses Stahl, who has been working as a prevention coach in this field for ten years. Because this “official denial” of bullying and violence, which hundreds of thousands of students suffer from week after week in German schools, leaves those affected to their own devices, while the “law of the strongest” can prevail unhindered.
Stahl therefore argues that both schools and parents need to be much more open about this problem, which is “extremely exacerbated” by social media on cell phones. “A problem like this can only be solved if it is openly identified and measures are also taken,” says Stahl. “We need a culture of looking and acting.”
To achieve this, we must “support teachers and school management” and promote prevention work. “And we must hold parents more accountable, because they are the ones who buy their children this ‘weapon’, as I call mobile phones,” adds the expert.
