Crime against children: How is Hyderabad planning to deal with this evil?
Crime against children
Hyderabad: Earlier this week, a four-year-old girl was allegedly raped by her school teacher in Bengaluru. This was the third such incident reported in Bengaluru in the past four months and parents across the country are naturally worried.
Gone are the times when young parents would be relieved after admitting their toddlers in “a known school” and then get busy with their jobs.
Sarah Ali Khan plans to send her two-year-old daughter, Aelia, to school next year. She says, “As a parent, I would opt for a known school but then these incidents are happening almost everywhere.
How do I know (what is safe?)... I would be concerned about the 5-6 hours that my girl would be away in school. So, I expect schools to be co-operative with us parents.”
City school authorities say that they are trying their best from installing CCTVs inside classrooms, corridors and even inside school buses, GPS inside school buses, posting live web feeds from playschools, to running background checks on teachers and other staffers.
Maya Sukumaran, principal of Gitanjali Senior School, says, “As a rule, we don’t allow a teacher to touch a child, girl or boy. It’s no business for them to touch anybody, for any purpose.”
To be able to achieve this, Maya doesn’t admit more than 30 students in any class. “The teacher-student ratio in our school is 1:12, this makes it easier for even teachers to observe the children. I insist that everyone, from teachers, aayas (help) to parents, look for signs of sexual abuse. If a kid has been traumatised, his or her face says it all.”
For these reasons, school principals prefer hiring female teachers for pre-primary classes. Jivitesh Reddy, principal of Niraj Public School, says, “In our school, 90 per cent of the staff is female and we like to keep it this way. It is easier for them, girls or boys, to open up to female teachers, somebody who has a motherly instinct.”
Now, school principals and parents are collectively encouraging children to speak up, by conducting counselling sessions or role-plays or through a book on personal safety that Chandana Raju and Sumana Rao are handing out to schools as a guide on good or bad touch.
( Source : dc correspondent )
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