Today, the Parents Association sent an appeal to the Government and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in which it asks Prime Minister Dritan Abazović and the minister of that department, Filip Adžić, to urgently do everything within their competence today to protect a group of high school students who have been suffering violence and threats for the past three days.
They requested that those children be safe through urgent, simultaneous activities with other competent institutions such as the police, prosecutor's office and courts, and that a message be sent to their attackers and others who deal with similar matters, that from today such behavior is not acceptable in Montenegro.
"If you are not aware, although the media has been talking about it for the last two days, three students of the Podgorica "Slobodan Škerović" Gymnasium were injured on Monday at around 19 p.m., when they were attacked by a group of teenagers near that educational institution, in front of a nearby cafe. "again on Tuesday, they were targeted by the same attackers, who brought reinforcements in front of the Gymnasium - more than a dozen peers. They waited for them before classes began, threatened them because they had previously reported to the police, called them abusive names and called for a fight," the appeal reads.
According to them, it did not end there, but they repeated the same thing a day later, on Thursday evening, when they gathered in front of the school with the same intention, but the incident was avoided because one of the teenagers they were looking for managed to leave the yard from the back. "He did this by returning to the school building and jumping out of the window, without anyone's protection or support."
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"This case that we are contacting you about is one case, but it is one of many that are happening and that shows that not enough is being done to protect children from abusers, and that abusers do not receive a clear message that they will be immediately sanctioned. We mention this case because at the moment a group of children is at risk, but there are many of their peers who are going through the same or something similar," their appeal states.
They also say that they know that part of the institutions reacted, but that they have to note, based on what they say they received as information, that the reactions were rather slow and insufficiently strong.
They showed, according to them, what they pointed out several times, even at the parents' protest in early March where Abazović and Adžić were present, that the system of our country does not react quickly or adequately when such cases happen.
"We must not allow a child aged 16, 15 or 9 to live in fear of whether they will get home safely from school, and that their parents should question every day whether they were allowed to let them out. We must not allow that when violence still happens to them, that they wait for hours and even days to give statements to the police, that they wait for days for the prosecutor to qualify the crime, .. and that, on the other hand, the suspected perpetrators are not contacted and taken into custody for everything they do, and that their parents and guardians do not be punished. If special procedures should be made for these cases, let us make them so that we know that we have priorities to protect children even when extraordinary/intensified security activities are taking place in the country," the appeal reads.
From the Association of Parents, they called on Abazović and Adžić to do everything in their power to stop this once and for all, "because none of us parents and our children can feel protected when we hear about these kinds of events or witness them."
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