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Photo,
Al Masry AlYoum Newspaper |
A
mathematics teacher in Alexandria is being detained on manslaughter
charges in Egypt after allegedly beating an 11 year old student to
death for not completing his homework. The teacher claimed that he
only intended to discipline the boy, but the incident brings to international
attention the larger problem of corporal punishment in the Egyptian
school system.
The
BBC reports that after using a ruler to punish him, the teacher is
alleged to have taken the young boy outside the classroom and hit
him violently in his stomach. The young pupil fainted and later died
in hospital of heart failure. T he teacher is reported by Egyptian
newspaper Al Masry Alyoum to have told the prosecutor that
he was only trying to ‘discipline the boy, not to kill him’.
Coptic
Orphans has seen numerous cases of damaging corporal punishment
in
Egyptian schools. In January of 2007 we reported about what happened
to Samira, a young girl from a rural area in Egypt. Beatings
with a ruler from Samira’s teacher left the tendons in her fingers
ravaged and her fine motor abilities destroyed. Samira waves her hands
in the air as if to shake something off when she talks about the ten
lashings that her teacher often inflicted. “The tenth is always the
worst, because the teacher hits the hardest of all.”
Mina, another
child who participated in the Not Alone program, received
beatings from his teacher, who extorted him by physical punishment
and lower exam grades with demands that Mina hire him for private
tutoring. Mina courageously told his Coptic Orphans Rep of the abuse.
Mina's Rep confronted the teacher without success, and then reported
the teacher to the school administration, who opened an investigation.
The police investigator who interviewed Mina after the case was surprised
with Mina’s rare initiative and courage. The investigator told Mina,
“you are a brave child.”
Coptic
Orphans addresses physical abuse in schools in individual cases through
the advocacy of local volunteer Reps like Mina’s and through regional
workshops that teach children and families how to stand up for their
basic rights in Egypt.
But according
to Coptic Orphans executive director Nermien Riad, more effort in
Egypt is needed to put teeth to the current ban on corporal punishment
in schools so that we may re-enforce a new culture that refuses to
tolerate child abuse in Egyptian society.
Coptic
Orphans is an award-winning international Christian development organization
that unlocks the God-given potential of disadvantaged children in
Egypt, and so equips them to break the cycle of poverty and become
change-makers in their communities. Since the founding of the organization
in 1988, Coptic Orphans has touched the lives of over 14,000 children
in Egypt.
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