Indonesian officials on Tuesday dismissed as excessive and unethical a proposal by an education official on Sumatra island that would require female senior high school students to undergo virginity tests to discourage premarital sex and protect against prostitution.
Muhammad Rasyid, head of the education office in South Sumatra’s district of Prabumulih, said he wants to start the tests next year and has proposed a budget for it. But other officials and activists have criticized the plan, arguing it is discriminatory and violates human rights.
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook lit up with outrage, with some people calling the tests a form of child abuse that could emotionally scar the students.
The following is a heartbreaking letter written by an 11-year-old who is deeply afraid that she will be dealt the same awful fate as her elder sister:
Dear Madam My name is XXX and I am 11 years old. I and my mum, sisters and brother came to England in 2005 when I had just turned 6 years old to join my dad who was at University. We come from Gambia in West Africa.
Three weeks ago we were watching a TV programme on African culture and as they were showing girls having their privates cut, my older sister who is 12 years old started crying. After 2 days she told my dad that she also had her private cut.
Mum and Dad never knew about it and she was told if she ever tells anyone the sprits will come and kill her immediately. She said it was done one weekend by my aunties at my nans house. Last Friday mum took her to our GP to have her checked and the doctor said it was done to her.
This morning when I went to school I told one of my teachers about it and together we went on the computer and found your group. The teacher asked me to write to you and ask for your help. I don’t want my private cut by anyone.
My dad loves us very much and he did not like what they done to my sister and he is very confussed. We should be going back to Gambia any time after Eid and he is worried and upset that they would do the same to me. I don’t what that too.
If you reply to this letter I will showe my dad and I am shore that he would be very glad to have your help. He is my best friend and if he knows what to do he would do it, he would not want anything to hurt us – I know that.
Please madam help me, and my dad. If you reply soon he would definately contact you if you can help. I really hope you can help me, not to have my private cut. I am reallye confused expessically seeing my dad so un-happy and not knowing what to do.
Thank you very much for reading my letter.
In my opinion, the very worst crimes are crimes committed agains6t children. I believe that genital mutilation is torture against children. To read that 24,000 children in the UK are at risk of having it performing against them is horrific! Anyone caught being a party to such a practice should be imprisoned for the same amount of time as a pedophile.
The teacher that had the courage and drive to make this heartfelt and inspirational video must be congratulated. Catherine Hogan, a teacher from Lindsay Place, has captured the very essence of what drives a caring, passionate teacher and her message is bound to alter some misconceptions felt by many students and parents. I was deeply moved and touched by this poignant and heartwarming clip.
Please watch this video and get your friends and family to do the same. Please notify others about its existence on Facebook and other social media devices. Only 12,624 have watched it from YouTube as I write this. This number doesn’t properly do justice to the quality and raw power of the clip.
Reflecting on my childhood (which wasn’t THAT long ago), I remember playing sporting games on our street with the neighbours, climbing trees, building Lego villages and riding bikes.
I was stunned when I first heard a class of grown kids that confessed to not being able to ride a bike. Sure, they are experts at driving a computerised racing car or skateboard on their game consoles. But an actual bike? Not a chance!
Thousands of children are starting secondary school unable to run, jump, throw a ball or catch, the head of UK Sport has said.
Susan Campbell has claimed ‘physically illiterate’ children ‘hardly move’ by the time they are ready to make the transition from primary school.
And she said the legacy of the Olympics in the summer could be lost if teachers in primary schools did not receive specialist PE training.
She warned some 11-year-olds aren’t able to take part in the most basic of sports by the time they go to secondary school.
Baroness Campbell, chairwoman of UK Sport and the Youth Sport Trust, said sport should be taken as seriously as literacy and numeracy in primary schools.
And she has called for primary school teachers to receive extra training in PE.
Parents, not without good reason, are reluctant to give their children the opportunity of playing on the streets because of the many potential risks that exist. Whether these risks are as prevalent as we have been raised to believe is questionable. Whether these risks should be weighed up with the many benefits of having our children experience the joys of bike riding and outdoor sports is worth discussing.
A scandal erupts where a child care worker allegedly rapes a young child. Were the parents who send their children to this center informed?
Of course not!
That would be acting transparently and we can’t have that! Fancy putting the interests of the victim over the welfare of the accused:
POLICE reject claim by Education Minister Grace Portolesi that they advised against telling parents that an out-of-hours school care program staff member sexually assaulted a child in his care.
Mark Christopher Harvey, of Largs North, was convicted in February this year of unlawful sexual intercourse with a young girl in 2010 while she was attending his out-of-hours school care program in the northwestern suburbs.
However, a mother of children who also used the program – who did not want to be named – has said parents were never informed.
Ms Portolesi emphatically told Parliament yesterday the decision to keep the information from parents had been “on the advice of SAPOL”.
However, a statement released last night by SA Police said the principal of the school involved was “advised by police that she should consult with DECS (the Education Department) to formulate a method of advising the school community what had occurred”.
Ms Portolesi refused to respond to the statement and stood by her earlier comments in Parliament.
The mother who spoke yesterday said her two children only told her there was a problem after a school friend saw Harvey on the TV news.
Her children were interviewed this year by police after raising their own concerns about Harvey.
At no time since his arrest had the school or the notified parents or Education Department apologised and no counselling had been offered, the mother said.
“I just want to know why we weren’t advised,” she said.
“I think it’s our right. I feel like a failure as a mother because I was not advised of this and was not able to help my children from the start.”
In Parliament, Ms Portolesi said that Harvey’s employment was “immediately terminated” on discovering his offence.
Opposition education spokesman David Pisoni told Parliament Harvey had been employed by the department for a month after his arrest.
“Why has the community not been officially notified?” he said.
Apparently our freedom isn’t as clear as we have been led to believe:
A MOTHER in the US has spent the night in jail after she was arrested for allowing her children to play outside unsupervised.
Texas mum Tammy Cooper was arrested for child endangerment after a neighbour saw her children riding their scooters around a cul-de-sac and called police.
Ms Cooper, who was arrested for child endangerment, insists she was watching her children from a lawn chair in her front yard.
According to Ms Cooper a police man arrived saying she was under arrest.
“I went out there to see what he was here for and he said, ‘Ma’am, we’re here for you.’ I said, ‘Oh really? Why?’ He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbours that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised,” Cooper told KRPC.
She says police also interrogated her children.
“My daughter had him [the police officer] around the leg saying, “Please, please don’t take my mom to jail. Please, she didn’t do anything wrong’”.
Damian Aspinall seems quite comfortable to have his child play with a gorilla. Even if such an activity isn’t as unsafe as it seems, can Mr. Aspinall explain how such an experiment is in the best interests of his child?
The men came from different walks of life on two continents: a children’s puppeteer in Florida, a hotel manager in Massachusetts, an emergency medical technician in Kansas, a day care worker in the Netherlands. In all, 43 men have been arrested over the past two years in a horrific, far-flung child porn network that unraveled like a sweater with a single loose thread.
In this case, the thread was a stuffed toy bunny.
The bunny, seen in a photo of a half-naked, distraught 18-month-old boy, was used to painstakingly trace a molester to Amsterdam. From there, investigators made one arrest after another of men accused of sexually abusing children, exchanging explicit photos of the attacks and even chatting online about abducting, cooking and eating youngsters.
Authorities have identified more than 140 young victims so far and say there is no end in sight as they pore through hundreds of thousands of images found on the suspects’ computers. They are also trying to determine whether the men who talked about murder and cannibalism actually committed such acts or were just sharing twisted fantasies.
We have all cheated on something in our lifetime. I’m not endorsing cheating by any means, but we have all done it.
A child who is found to be cheating should be confronted, but not in front of the class and should definitely not have to put up with unnecessary and unhelpful labels and be subjected to gruesome corporal type punishment:
Unable to bear the trauma of being labeled a ‘cheat’ and unable to bear the taunts of her teachers, an 11-year-old girl jumped to her death from the roof of the five-storied apartment building of in which her school. The incident took place is located in Howrah’s Bijoy Kumar Mukherjee Road on Thursday morning. The incident highlights the poor state of affairs in educational institutions across the state. In spite of a blanket ban on corporal punishment, students are regularly falling victim to high-handedness of teachers. This is, however, the first time in recent years that a child has been driven to suicide by those she is supposed to trust and respect.
The principal of the school and the concerned teacher were detained following a complaint from the girl’s father Shiv Narayan Mishra. He claimed that principal Dilip Kumar Dubey gave his daughter a tongue-lashing, telling her to ‘go to hell’ and remain uneducated for the rest of her life. This may have led the Class-VI girl to suicide. While the school operates from the first floor of the building, the other floors have residential flats which had given the kid access to the roof.
It’s just not sufficient to fire a teacher who is acting inappropriately towards their students. Often these teachers pop up in another school, sometimes another country, and continue to offend.
A teacher that encourages a student to stuff a pie down his pants shouldn’t just be banned from the classroom, he should be banned from society:
A teacher who asked a female pupil to stuff a pie down his pants has been struck off the teaching register.
Gavin Bradford was said to have made improper suggestions of a sexual nature to 20 girls at a college in Canada.
He was said to have asked them to smear themselves in ketchup and eggs and pour sour milk into their underwear.
Bradford, 37, returned home to Glasgow after the Canadian scandal and got a job as a performing arts lecturer at Coatbridge College in January 2010.
He has now been judged “unfit to teach” by the General Teaching Council Scotland.
Bradford did not turn up at the hearing in Edinburgh.
His removal from the teaching register in Scotland comes after the Ontario authorities tipped off their Scottish counterparts about his behaviour.
The exchanges happened over the internet late at night when Bradford was teaching in Canada.
He asked more than 20 girls as young as 12 to switch on their webcams during online conversations so he could watch them.
Struck off the register? If found guilty, he should be locked away for a long time and put on a sex offenders list!
Topical Teaching 