A survey of draft laws under discussion in Parliament on preventing and combating the abuse and mistreatment of children in the educational and school environment

Violence against children can take very different forms and guises, and occur in many different contexts, from family to school, deeply influencing the healthy and correct development of the individual's personality and causing trauma, injuries and even irreversible psychological damage. When we speak of mistreatment we refer to that combination of violent, aggressive, oppressive or sometimes even absent situations and/or conditions that may be experienced by a baby, a child, over the course of a lifetime, usually not in an isolated form, that affect bodily integrity, physical, emotional, intellectual and moral development, and whose manifestations are neglect and/or physical and/or psychological and/or sexual abuse by a family member or third party.

From a legal point of view, in order to correctly contextualise the issue of preventing and combating all forms of abuse and mistreatment of children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child cannot be ignored.
The issue has become the subject of a series of bills currently being considered in Parliament that are aimed at introducing new provisions to strengthen the fight against tragic episodes of this kind involving children. The objective that is shared in essence by all the texts of the draft laws is identified, as far as children are concerned, in the need to prevent and counteract, both in the public and private sphere, abusive or harmful conduct, including of a psychological nature, against them in educational services for children and in pre-schools.

Attached is an overview of draft legislation on the prevention and combating of abuse and mistreatment of children in education and schools.