Abusive teachers should not escape penalty

A gavel in a court. [Photo/IC]

All the first-year pupils in Yuhan Primary School in Linyi, East China's Shandong province, were instructed to hit themselves in the face 100 times by their teacher. Although later the teacher was transferred to another school, Jin Zegang, a professor of law at Tongji university, asked why such behavior went unpunished when there is a law against child abuse:

What happened in Linyi is not an isolated incident. There are countless reports about bad teachers that hurt small children physically and mentally.

Worse, every time such an incident happens, the schools and kindergartens always try to deny any responsibility and seek to protect their staff, while the judiciary always claims such behavior is not a crime. None of the teachers involved in the reported incidents has received any penalty.

In the Linyi case, the principal of the school where the teacher worked said this teacher just happened to have done something wrong and now serves in another school. Will he commit the same wrong again? Are his new pupils at risk?

Actually, several laws, including the ones on education, the teaching faculties at primary and secondary schools, and the one on the protection of minors, prohibit such abuse of children. But the absence of specifications in the Criminal Law left local judicial staff a loophole so they didn't have to act. Even though some pupils were wounded, they simply turned a blind eye to the scars, because they had an excuse for evading their responsibility to defend social justice.

The latest amendment to the Criminal Law finally includes child abuse as a crime. Now that it has been done, we expect the law to be strictly enforced.

Besides, a national system is needed, so that those with records of child abuse are excluded from the teaching profession. Only in this way can our children be effectively protected.