Madrassa teacher tortures student

MULTAN: A madrassa teacher beat his seven-year-old pupil on Tuesday, alleging that the student ‘didn’t study’.

In Punjab’s Rajanpur district madrassa teacher Qari Abdul Latif attacked seven-year-old Nazim with wooden sticks, causing the boy severe head injuries.

Latif is a teacher at a madrassa affiliated with Masjid-e-Nimra on Zia Shaheed Road.

People in the area said Latif attacked the boy because he hadn’t completed some work that Latif had assigned to him. The work assigned to Nazim was not school work, but was alleged to be some personal work of Latif’s that he wanted taken care of.

Nazim had to be taken to hospital where he received seven stitches on his head.

The boy’s parents have not yet registered a case about this incident with the police.

After Nazim was released from hospital, his parents took him home.

For his part, Latif claims that Nazim was being disobedient and was not studying, which is why he beat him. According to Latif, he had not meant to beat Nazim up with wooden sticks, which just ‘happened’ to strike the boy’s head. “I didn’t mean to burst the boy’s head open,” insisted Latif.

According to a Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) report released in 2009, in recorded cases of corporal punishment in 2009 abuse was meted out by teachers in a majority of cases.

According to the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, corporal punishment is defined as the use of physical force for the purpose of correcting a child’s behaviour. Children studying in madrassas are extremely susceptible to various kinds of abuse, according to the rights group, as the HRCP’s annual report of 2009 states that 52 per cent of children studying in seminaries experience sexual harassment.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 7^th, 2010.