Rama's full speech/ The murder of the 14-year-old, the measures and the message for politics

2024-11-20 13:35:00, Politikë CNA

Rama's full speech/ The murder of the 14-year-old, the measures and the

For three days, big and small have been shocked by the macabre murder of a 14-year-old student with a knife by another teenager.

The whole dynamic of the tragedy highlights the permanent threat that all families who raise children live with in today's world where social networks and especially TikTok or Snapchat absorb our children into their labyrinths every day from a very young age. .

The authority of parents and teachers, as well as all our efforts in the family or at school for the education of children are challenged hourly by the parallel world of these networks where there is no filter, no protection, no positive stimulus in support of these efforts and where not only education, but even the mental health of the smallest, of teenagers are seriously questioned.

These are simple truths with which it is not difficult to all agree as parents or as citizens witnessing the society of today's world, where guaranteeing the safety of children is the priority of our priorities, but they are not the same simple appropriate answers in these conditions, so challenging when many countries are trying to put protective filters, but still without any significant results.

Meanwhile, every parent is a witness to the fact that the pressure of drawing children to smartphone screens is becoming more and more unbearable even within the walls of the house itself.

We, as a government, have long been engaged in the research of this problem, following step by step what other countries do, but also in the search for possible solutions to reduce this increasingly frightening pressure.

In fact, similar initiatives have been taken from Australia where it is currently trying to ban access to social networks for all children up to 16 years old, to France which is discussing making it a condition of parental approval for opening an online account under 15 years old or Spain where it was initially decided that children up to 14 years old are not allowed to open online accounts and recently where the limit has been increased to 16 years old. Beyond these efforts and debates related to these initiatives, the still open problem remains the lack of a system of their implementation as a result of the difficulty in the technical aspect related to some factors which it is not the place to elaborate here today.

Now, our dilemma as a government is whether we should also try to move in the direction of setting up filters when in fact from all the experiences so far in Europe or beyond Europe, we learn that their effectiveness is still very low, while the incentives of violence and cases of bullying in the online world of children and teenagers, only increase or take a drastic measure for the complete closure of Tik-Tok and why not, of SnapChat in the territory of Republic of Albania.

We have decided to raise this dilemma for a broad discussion with all communities of parents where all schools will be engaged, under the guidance of the Ministry of Education to make a decision as democratic as possible for such a big problem, but I repeat , complex in its content and in its solution.

On the other hand, as I announced on the eve of the school year when, together with the Ministers of Education and Order, we addressed the topic of school security, we are working intensively on the project of setting up a new digital school control system and every class in the framework of the new national system of monitoring with smart cameras of the national roads and the streets of our cities.

We have been working for more than a year on this project with the government of the United Emirates where this system has been implemented with tremendous success in terms of increasing security in general and with absolutely impressive results in increasing security and reducing bullying throughout school.

We have also agreed on the volume of financing with the support of the Abu Dhabi fund, and soon we will publicly present the project and start work on its implementation, which we intend to fully complete, step by step, within 20 months, while step by step schools should start to be equipped with this system.

For several years we have prohibited the entry of mobile phones into schools, but it is time to also review the sanctions related to the violations of this general rule, while the deployment of security officers and psychologists in our schools have brought a series of positive results which undoubtedly will deepen significantly with the introduction of technology eyes in the surveillance of the perimeter of every school and even every class where practically parents will be able to see everything that happens with their children and with the teaching process whenever they want to verify the progress or problems related to their children.

In closing, I want to underline that the tragedy of the 14-year-old student, his family and the Fan Noli school community is too big to be included in the very narrow perimeter of the quarrel of a pseudo political and media elite which day and night it diverts every national and public interest, every problem or event and even every disaster and tragedy into the sludge channel of its own interests for power and business with the feelings and problems of the people.

This tragedy should unite us as parents and as citizens to realize that each of us must take on more responsibility in our part of the front for the protection of children, which starts within the walls of the home, continues within the walls of the school and extends wherever the lives of our children take place, including the television screens where the vast majority of those who shed crocodile tears for Albania and the people are in fact irresponsible purveyors of the language of violence and occasionally open instigators of violence, including the very hall of the Parliament of Albania, which is an open school of violence and incitement of the language of violence.

I assure all parents that personally I am very aware, fully committed that in my part of the front together with the government colleagues we do together with them all possible things to relieve our children from the harmful pressure of the networks social and to increase the quality of their safety as a whole.

I look forward to the results of the extensive consultation with the parenting communities about the approach we should decide together on Tik-Tok, SnapChat or both because from all our research, they are the two most fertile sources of perversion , of inciting violence and acts of bullying until and then in tragedies like this last one, from which we must all come together as a society and as a state with the most effective response./ CNA