Seven-year-old suffers broken nose at school in Marbella after allegedly being pushed and insulted

A seven-year-old girl has had to undergo surgery for a broken nose after being allegedly pushed and shoved at her school in Marbella by another pupil who had apparently been teasing and insulting her since last year. This is what the minor told the doctors who treated her at the Costa del Sol Hospital and this is recorded in the medical discharge report, to which SUR has had access. Her mother told SUR that she knew that some of the classmates of the little girl, originally from Colombia, mocked her when she read aloud and called her “ugly” and “fat”, and also used a derogatory word to refer to her nationality. However, she also admitted that she “downplayed its importance”. With a lump in her throat, the girl’s mother admitted to feeling “a sense of impotence for not having taken action sooner”.

The story goes back a year, when the teacher informed the mother that the child "did not know how to read" and was "distracted" in class. "She did not want to go to school, and her sister, who picked her up, told me that the girls were bothering her," she explained. Her mother was aware of the situation, but also thought that "it was childish things" and did not give it "too much importance". However, she says that her eldest daughter spoke to the child's teacher about it and she told her that "she was going to talk to the children" and that "it was not going to happen again".

The education department, on the other hand, reported that the school had no previous complaints or warnings from the family about a possible situation of bullying, and that the teachers had not detected any evidence of bullying either.

This school year, the girl is repeating the second year of primary school and her mother says that she started "with more encouragement" because "the girls who were bothering her" moved to third year. However, just a few days after the start of classes, she explained that she came home with grazes and, when asked about them, replied that “the same girls as always had pushed her over”. On Monday 3 October, at around 3.30pm, the little girl was leaving the dining room on her way to her extracurricular activities when she was pushed, causing her to suffer a frontal and nasal injury.

With her face covered in blood, suffering from abdominal pain and dizziness, the girl was taken to hospital by her father, who had been alerted by the school. “She didn’t tell her dad anything, but she did tell the doctors that she had been walking when one of the girls pushed her. If they had been playing, she would have managed to put her arms out, but she was distracted and took a direct blow to the face,” her mother explained. The following day, the girl underwent surgery.

Still in pain, the minor is trying to recover, while her mother deals with the "anger" she has been feeling for days that the school had not alerted the health workers and that the head teacher did not contact her. "Yesterday, when we left the hospital, I went to look for her teacher and she told me that she didn't know what had happened. How can she not know what is happening in her own centre?" The mother admits her own fault for not informing them of what was happening, but asks that they “pay more attention,” since “it’s not the children’s fault if we don’t correct them.”

The education department referred to the episode as "an incident between pupils" in which "one of them suffered a fall that required medical attention". The school has activated a protocol to clarify what happened and take the appropriate measures.