Many times I come across stories from friends who tell me about how their child is hit by their teacher at school. Sometimes the parents are understanding as to why the slap, smack or as they say here ‘falaqa’ was given but other times the parent is angry and depressed when their child comes home with a hand mark on their cheek or even a black eye. The reality that they will be sending their child back to that classroom where it happened maybe not the next day but within a few days to return to their abuser to receive lessons is very emotionally exhausting on them.
Recently I have come across more and more stories of abuse from as deep as kids in the schools trying to strangle each other, molesting younger students and even trying to feed them food with drugs in it to be able to rape them.
This may sound so far-fetched and away from reality for many of you who read this but here, in Morocco it is like an open secret in many communities but the major problem, yes bigger then what I mentioned is that parents don’t know what to do about what is going on and how to protect their children. When I spoke to some of them they said, ‘ no one will listen to us, the headmaster wont listen and no authority wont do anything about our complaints we are just called liars and story tellers.’
Someone may think how do we know this is true or not well, there is a wealth of videos and pictures from classmates who have cell phones. Thank God this has allowed parents to be able to see their child isn’t making up stories and that many times they are being hit for not replying with the correct answer or not completing their homework! but that also makes the pain worse to see their child being hit for such a frivolous matter.
what about when the young kids who don’t have phones in school enter into their classroom and get hit by their teachers, what was the cause for slapping a 7-year-old across the cheek so you leave your hand print on his face for hours? what is the cause to punch a 10-year-old ? who gave you the right to harm any human like this especially a child?
If anyone has the right to hit a child it would be his own parents and these parents are fed up with their children being beaten, they are fed up with the broken school system their child attends odd hours of school from 9am-12pm then goes home for a break to then return from 2pm-5pm, 5 days a week and most 10 year olds don’t know how to read efficiently nor can they understand how to do basic algebra or long division.
These criminals arent teachers, most of the time they don’t even have a degree to teach and those who do either never learnt how to actually carry out any teaching methods or they just dont bother because they know no one will say anything about it.
No child deserves a slap in the face and certainly not for answering a question wrong, especially when he has a teacher who didn’t understand how to teach the child what he is asking him.
I’m hoping to make a change through private teaching for these children and to show their parents their children aren’t ‘difficult’ and ‘unable to learn’ but that the teachers are the ones who deserve to be reprimanded as they are the ones who are incapable and unable to learn basic human decency.
Ajnabiyah 