Bulgaria is rapidly catching up with globalisation. For years, we thought we had it all: McDonald`s, Hollywood cinema, Nike, the list seems endless. However, one thing many didn’t imagine would become fashionable here is a practice known in the UK as “happy slapping.”
It is a fad where an unsuspecting victim is attacked while someone else records the assault with a mobile phone camera. In the beginning, these acts involved slapping the victim as a joke. But matters have gone further. Nowadays the incidents are more violent, disgraceful and anything but funny. Attacks vary from slapping to assault, to raping, to smearing faeces on victims’ faces. Stripping and urinating in public “for the camera” so that others might “enjoy” this behaviour later on the internet have also appeared in Bulgaria as a sub-category of “happy slapping”.
A recent documentary on bTV, one of Bulgaria’s national commercial television stations, showed a girl in Bourgas who had been a victim of faeces smearing. Her attack was recorded on a phone camera. The teenage girl described how she witnessed a similar incident where urine was poured over another victim, a moment also caught on phone camera.
On September 29, Bulgarian National Radio reported that two popular Bulgarian websites - Data.bg and VBbox7 - contained more than 20 videos depicting school violence and pornographic material involving teenagers. Recorded using mobile phones, the videos had been among the most visited on the sites. On the recordings, BNR said, one could see school children fighting surrounded by a large group of laughing - and filming - spectators. Neither teachers nor school security staff were in the videos. At present, the materials have either been removed from the websites or have been made more difficult to find.
The grotesque behaviour appears to be part of a continuing trend that seems to have particularly targeted girls. In the past two months, incidents of school violence or immoral behaviour among school girls have been occurring more than ever before. In October, a girl from Veliko Turnovo attacked a female classmate with a metal hand weapon. In Pernik, a 13-year old girl injured a classmate of hers in the crotch so seriously that the boy needed an emergency operation. On November 6, a 16-year-old girl was admitted to Sofia’s Pirogov emergency hospital after she was hit over the head with a chair. The incident, which happened at the capital’s 153rd School, was a result of a fight between the girl and a male classmate of hers. On November 13, a 16-year-old girl in Dobrich bit and slapped a female classmate after an alleged provocation by other classmates. These are not simply examples of a new, morally distorted generation acting out violently. This aggression is a misunderstood form of female emancipation, psychologists say.
The violence is sometimes self-directed. On October 13, a 14-year-old girl stripped right outside the headmaster’s office at an elite Plovdiv high school. This happened just two weeks after the girl was accepted at the school. Witnesses of the event told bTV that the girl claimed she had no hesitation about removing her clothes in a public place. Allegedly, the boy she had been talking to dared her to do so in front of the headmaster’s office. Without a word, she walked off and disrobed in front of her classmates. There was a similar case in May last year, when two 18-year-old girls stripped naked on the top of a Cabriolet as a way to celebrate the graduation day of a male friend of theirs. The list continues.
The reasons for a young generation publicly degrading themselves are many. It’s behaviour that reflects a wider society full of aggression, Education Minister Daniel Vulchev said in an October 13 interview with news web site Dnes+. Bulgaria must decide, Vulchev said, whether to re-introduce marks for conduct. “We must see how this could affect the behaviour of children,” he said.
In addition, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s governing body, the Holy Synod, is currently pushing for the state to introduce religion as a subject in schools. On November 7, news agency BGnes reported that Varna and Velikopreslav Metropolitan Kiril held a news conference on the recent violence in Bulgarian schools. Kiril, together with people committed to “Orthodox values,” will be sending a letter supporting religious studies under the motto “NO to aggression, YES to the subject of religion in Bulgarian schools”. The letter is expected to be sent to the Holy Synod, the President, Parliament and Parliament’s committee on education.
One of the participants at the metropolitan’s meeting was the director of the Municipality Directorate of Education, Kosta Bazitov. He said religion should be introduced as a subject in schools as soon as possible. In cases of mixed-religion classes, he said, those of faiths other than Orthodoxy should attend ethics classes. However, he did not give any examples of schools that have introduced religion as a subject and where violence among pupils has decreased.
On November 15, another meeting was held between members of the Holy Synod and Bulgarian intellectuals, on the problem of violence in Bulgaria’s schools and how to deal with it. After the meeting Kiril announced that within a month a draft proposal on introducing religion in Bulgarian schools would be ready.
