José Manuel López, father of the teenager Kira López, who committed suicide a year ago, when she was 15, has collected almost 70,000 signatures in less than 24 hours through the citizen platform Change.org to ask the Ministry of Education for a national protocol against school harassment or ‘bullying’.
“My daughter committed suicide at the age of 15. Bullying is not a child’s thing,” this father warns in the petition, in which he recalls that, in 2020, 61 minors committed suicide in Spain.
José Manuel López has launched the petition this Thursday, May 19, 2022, just one year after his daughter’s suicide. “A year ago today the worst day of my life. On May 19, 2021 our daughter Kira, who was only 15 years old, committed suicide,” he writes.
As he relates, the night before, his daughter hugged him and told him that she loved him very much and that he was “the best daddy in the world”. “That was his way of saying goodbye to him. Now I know,” she recalls in the text of the collection of signatures.
Faced with this situation, it requests the creation by the Ministry of Education of a national protocol against bullying, “which specifies the pertinent actions both in the case of harassment by teachers towards students and in the case of bullying among equals.”
López considers that “with Kira, no action was taken in time” and he believes it is necessary for all schools to “guarantee the urgent activation of psychological care in the event of clear suspicions of abuse and immediate intervention if the victim’s risk of suicide is detected.”
“Every minute without taking action is a minute where a boy or a girl may be suffering and in danger,” he warns.
In addition, the promoter of the campaign seeks to “end the abandonment of mental health that exists in many educational centers” and, in this sense, criticizes the “insufficient ratios of the number of psychologists per student, the breaches of protocols against bullying and neglect of internal channels to report”.
“Educational centers must react with the speed and professionalism that these cases require. Enough of thinking that mockery, insults, aggressions are ‘children’s things’. They are not. They are a serious social problem that can end (and that ends) with innocent lives like that of our daughter Kira”, ditch.
José Manuel López has already contacted the Ministry of Education informing them of his collection of signatures and requesting a meeting. “Now I am waiting for a response that, given the seriousness and urgency of what we are demanding,” we hope will arrive very soon, “he declared.
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