Nine-year-old boy told: “We don’t want you; go back to your own country”
A nine-year-old Nepalese boy was physically assaulted by five classmates, with a sixth filming the attack, reports SIC Notícias today, citing Rádio Renascença.
According to Renascença, the boy was equally ‘insulted’, by phrases like “go back to where you came from”, “we don’t want you here”, “you don’t belong here”.
Ana Mansoa, director of the Padre Alves Correio Centre (CEPAC) which helps support immigrants described the child as being “the victim of a lynching” (lynching in Portuguese not meaning the same as it does in English).
She told Renascença that the attack was motivated by xenophobia and racism.
It was apparently briefly uploaded onto social media, but has since been removed.
The child was left with “bruises all over his body” and “open wounds” – but out of “fear”, his mother did not take him to a hospital, nor did she complain to the authorities.
The case was dealt with only in a school context, said Mansoa – without the school reporting the aggressions.
The result was that one of the offending classmates was suspended for three days.
None of this has been ‘proved’ beyond Mansoa’s word: the school has not been identified – and the Ministry of Education has since stressed that this is the first they have heard of an incident of this kind.
But according to the director of CEPAC, the attack has had a “big impact on the family, who ended up asking to transfer schools to ensure their son’s safety. The child “wakes up at night with nightmares and crying”, and “doesn’t want to go to school”, she added.
According to Mansoa, the family has been living in Portugal for two years. They arrived in the country as asylum seekers and are socially integrated: “They have a fixed income and their tax situation is regularised”, she said.
This is just another case in the context of increasing reports about immigrants; the numbers of them and ‘feelings of insecurity’ on both sides.
Recent attacks in Porto have been linked to ‘far right extremists’. Indeed, a ‘protest’ last Saturday saw a new right wing political party (Ergue-te) cited for potential ‘hate speech’.
Source material: SIC Notícias
