Monday the 3rd of September a new school year started in China. With that, a sad trend sparkled in recent years, occurred once more.

At 8 am, while the children were running towards the gates of a school in Enshi city in the Hubei Province, a 40-year-old man named Yu, killed eight students and wounded two others. The details of the attack had been posted online in the early morning by the Enshi Police on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter). Subsequently, the message has been removed leaving the statement from the Enshi Government the only official coverage of the news. The attacker has been released a few months ago, after serving an eight-year sentence for attempted murder – according to a report published and then taken down by Chinese media he had stabbed his former girlfriend 40 times.

The attack is not an isolated tragedy. But, due to the secrecy exercised by the Chinese government on the issue, it is difficult to establish the extent of the matter.

The beginning of the trend is usually identified with the attack in 2010 at an elementary school in Nanping, in the Fujian province, where eight children lost their life. Zheng Minsheng, the 41-year-old man responsible for the killings, has been sentenced to death and executed a month later. A few hours after the execution of the sentence, Cheng Kangbing (33-year-old), a teacher on sick leave due to mental illness, wounded sixteen students in a primary school in Leizhou City (Guandong Province). After that, a series of copycat crimes sparked all over China. In only two years, at least 25 people died and 110 were injured in similar attacks.

Despite the severe punishments – all the attackers have been sentenced to death -, such crimes have continued. Big cities are no exceptions. In June, Huang Yichuan, a 29-year-old man who had just moved to Shanghai one month before, decided to attack children attending the Shanghai World Foreign Language Primary School. As he told the authorities, he couldn’t find any job and was extremely unhappy with his life. Thus, he decided to take it out on somebody else and, after careful planning – the man took pictures of schools in Shanghai and Guangzhou -, he committed his crime. A similar story is the one of Jia, a 49-year-old migrant worker from Heilongjiang province, who wounded twenty pupils at a Beijing primary school in January. According to his colleagues, he was angry because the school wouldn’t renew his contract as a maintenance worker.

As of today, it is impossible to know how many children have lost their lives or how many attacks have taken place. This is a consequence of the already mentioned secrecy of the Chinese Government on the issue and the tight censorship, as well as by the nature of the attacks themselves. They have been carried out in a huge variety of ways, by using knives, pitchforks, hammers, axes or cars – guns are not included in the list most likely because firearm control policies are tight in China, making it almost impossible to have mass-shootings. However, there are some common traits between the attackers who decide to kill the children. Usually, they are men in their 30s or 40s, unemployed or with a precarious working situation and mentally unstable.

Mental health is a rising issue difficult to tackle in China because of the social stigma related to cultural beliefs of a certain status and personal reputation. According to an epidemiological survey conducted in four provinces and published on BMJ in 2019, the prevalence of mental disorders among adults was 17.5%. In addition, the recognition rate is far below the average, as well as the average of people receiving treatment for serious mental disorders (150 people per 100 000 people in need). Moreover, even those who seek help can’t always find it. The treatments are usually expensive and people without public insurance or unable to pay for a private one are left out and they fall on the shoulders of families and relatives. Unprepared and sometimes ashamed for the condition of the patient, the family often ends up leaving the patient alone, aggravating his or her situation with isolation. Again, the Chinese government secrecy and scarcity of data make it hard to establish how many mentally ill Chinese are out there and not being treated. However, not all the school attackers were officially recognized as mentally unstable and it would be a long shot connecting the attacks only to the precarious mental condition of an unstable man.

Another common element between these attackers is the choice of killing children. In China, killing children is not only wicked for ethical reasons, but it is also a ‘threat to social security’, as it has already been defined back in 2010 by the government. In fact, for many people, children are an investment for the future. It is not only for the sake of the child that the parents want him or her to get the best education, study abroad, be top of the class, enter a good university and then find a top job. The return of the investment is collected when the parents age and, as it is typical for Chinese families, they move in with the son (or daughter). Thus, killing a child means literally destroying a family both for sentimental and financial reasons.

This story is just one of the many telling us that it is very difficult to know what is exactly going on in China. These lone wolves could be the expression of discontent among low qualified social classes which are seeing the society changing radically and fast in front of their eyes and feel left out. However, the tight censorship and the lack of data make it very hard to understand the extension of these phenomena, leaving us uncertain and ignorant of what is happening in the country where 18% of the world population lives.

L'articolo China’s lone wolves: the attacks targeting children outside schools proviene da InsideOver.

They are everywhere in Dakar and in the main cities of Senegal, it is impossible to ignore them. Usually they do not have shoes and their skin is covered with scars caused by years of scratches and disease. They have just one purpose: begging and collecting the amount of money and food required by their teacher, in order to avoid a severe punishment.
The justification for that? The zakat, the religious duty to purify the soul from the material goods prescribed by the Koran.

L'articolo Al Baqra 2.43 proviene da InsideOver.

“I was teaching a girl in 2011. She was 13 years old. I liked her because she was beautiful. I manipulated her grades. If she got a good grade, I tried to lower it. I’d humiliate her in class and she finally agreed to meet me,” the unnamed teacher revealed to Unreported World. He had forced a student into having sex with him – a practice known as “sex for grades” – which remains widespread in many African states. The child in question left school soon after, forgoing her education because of the trauma of sexual abuse.

Despite wishing to remain anonymous, the man, who is still a teacher, spoke candidly about his assault of a minor on camera because he said that the custom is so prevalent that he was not worried about having charges pressed against him. He believed that this kind of exploitation remains rampant since it may be difficult to truly stamp it out of society.

He initially discovered that teachers could wield their authority in this manner when he was a student himself and a teacher asked him to take a girl to his house.

There are little records of how many teachers in African countries engage in the practice, and very rarely do the perpetrators face prosecution. Most of the cases go unreported due to the shame and stigma attached. As a result, innumerable young girls face gender-based violence, which includes sexual abuse, exploitation, and rape by male teachers.

Filmmaker Kiki King, who shot the documentary in Mozambique, told Marie Claire that countless girls are bullied into having sex in exchange for good grades at school. She said that the students are often led to believe that if they do not have sexual relationships with their teacher, they are going to fail the year.

“In terms of people being prosecuted and going to jail, I really struggled to find anyone,” King said.

“What it comes down to is the same problem with sexual violence anywhere in the world under any circumstances; it’s one girl’s word against one man’s word. And unfortunately, women are often blamed for things that happened to them – they’re not believed and they’re not taken seriously.”

Also known as “sexually transmitted grades”, teachers employ various tactics to lure the underage girls into sexual relationships. Apart from the promise of good grades, they may also bribe her with things like mobile phones, clothes, food, and other gifts. The harassment and manipulation generally occurs by the teacher accosting the students either during or after school time. More often than not, girls feel fearful to turn down the lascivious advances out of worry that they may get lower grades or be punished in some other way.

If the sexual assault does become public, the blame is often placed on the girl with the belief that she dressed provocatively or displayed a certain type of demeanour to warrant the unwanted attention from the teacher.

In instances where the girl becomes pregnant, instead of seeking out justice for the sexual assault of a minor, most families prefer to negotiate with the man to provide financial support. Furthermore, in African culture, taboos associated with underage pregnancies mean that the girl will also face the backlash of being a social outcast and her education will come to an abrupt end.

Human Rights Watch believe that the sexual overtones girls experience at school are heavily influenced by gender stereotypes. Some girls told the organisation that teachers had a tendency to use inappropriate language and behaviour – for instance, describing girls’ bodies or clothes in a sexual manner when speaking to students.

While these situations are often nonchalantly characterised as a “relationship” between a teacher and student, Human Rights Watch condemned the practice, stating that it undermines the gravity of the abuse, affects reporting, and blurs the perpetrators’ perception of the severity of these abuses and that cases should be treated, and prosecuted, as sexual exploitation and abuse of children.

L'articolo Teachers Blackmailing Students Into Sex For Good Grades proviene da InsideOver.

(United Nations) An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition that devastated a busy marketplace in northern Yemen’s rebel-held Hajja province sparked a global outcry in March 2016, when the attack’s death toll emerged – more than 100 civilians were killed, among them – 23 boys.

At the time, Saudi officials declared a legitimate strike on a Houthi rebel base. Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, disagreed and said the bombing of Khamees market in the Mastaba district should be investigated as a war crime.

It was not the only time that young Yemenis got caught up in the carnage. A new United Nations report has verified 11,779 grave violations against children between April 2013, during Yemen’s spiralling political crisis, and the end of last year.

“Children did not start the war in Yemen, but they are paying the highest price,” says the report of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres. The recruitment and use of children, the killing and maiming of children, attacks on hospitals and schools and the denial of humanitarian access for children have been constant features.

The 16-page report comes at a crucial time. At the end of July, Guterres will publish his annual “list of shame” of armed groups that commit atrocities against youngsters – a list that has in the past named and discredited the Saudi-led coalition.

In its new report, the UN blames all parties. Too many airstrikes by Saudi and UAE jets have ended the lives of youngsters early. Too often, Houthi rebels have armed children as young as ten with assault rifles and sent them to the front lines.

The document “paints a devastating picture of the violations affecting boys and girls over the past five years,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters at the world body’s premises in New York.

“With over 7,500 cases, the most prevalent violation documented by the UN was the killing and maiming of children. The report also documents high levels of recruitment and use of child soldiers.”

The UN confirmed 3,034 cases of children being recruited into armed forces, mostly the Houthi rebel group, which took the Yemeni capital Sanaa in 2014 and say they are waging a revolution against graft.

The UN also verified that 2,776 children have been killed by warfare. Almost half of these deaths were attributed to airstrikes and aerial attacks — mostly from the coalition, which joined the war in 2015 to back the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The numbers are startling, but are likely an under-count, the report says. Collecting data on deaths from airstrikes is hampered by poor access around Yemen; and groups like the Houthis deter members from talking about child soldiers.

Virginia Gamba, the UN’s envoy on children and armed conflict, said military chiefs had shown blatant disregard for the welfare of children in prosecuting a war that has turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“Despite some positive measures adopted by parties to protect boys and girls from grave violations, the suffering of children in Yemen has worsened during the reporting period, becoming simply appalling,” said Gamba.

The Yemen conflict has pushed what was already one of the Arab World’s poorest nations to the brink of famine and killed tens of thousands of people since March 2015, according to the World Health Organization.

Years of political upheaval and fighting have forced some 3.3 million people to flee their homes and left 24.1 million others — more than two-thirds of the population — in need of medicine, food and other aid.

The Saudi-Emirati alliance intervened in Yemen in 2015 to try and restore the government that was overthrown by the Houthis. It is largely seen as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which publicly backs the rebels.

Hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough were raised by the inking of a truce in Sweden late last year, but in implementing the deal, Hodeidah, a port city, has ground to a halt and conflict continues elsewhere.

“The recent developments in the peace process must lead to tangible progress on the ground. The civilian population, especially children, is kept hostage of a conflict they didn’t choose to be in,” said Gamba.

L'articolo Abuses Against Yemeni Children Reach 12,000: UN proviene da InsideOver.