Egypt imprison Arabic teacher for taping a school kid crying

CAIRO - 5 September 2018: The Egyptian authorities ordered on Thursday the imprisonment of an Arabic teacher who found involved in shooting a video clip showing a boy crying for sleep at the class for 15 days pending investigation.

The video, which went viral on social media platforms this week, outraged many Egyptian parents and child rights activists, who described it as tantamount to ‘e-bullying’.

In the footage, the six-year-old child is seen crying while calling his class teacher a “Hajja” (a term referring to elderly women in Egypt) and begging her to let him sleep for a while. The teacher appears in the video holding a stick. Caning is strictly prohibited in Egypt’s schools.



The Arabic teacher, who works in a primary school in the Cairo suburb of Al Sahel, face charges of belonging to a banned group, spreading rumors that harm the public interest and using social media sites to publish fake news.

“My son does not want to go to school again after knowing about the video, which has made him a laughing stock,” the boy’s father told a local television station. “We were surprised by the spread of the video on social media. This has caused us harm. It was his first school day after a long illness. It was natural for him to cry. He addressed his teacher as a Hajja out of respect because she is an old woman,” added the father, identified as Ahmad Saleh.

Earlier, the Education Ministry said that the teacher, who had shot the video, was punished by having 10 days of his salary deducted. He was also transferred from the school to an administrative job. The class teacher had a five-day cut from her pay due to her “non-professional conduct”, while the head of the school was found guilty of negligence and had three days salary deducted, the spokesman added in a statement.
The incident came weeks after Unicef and Egypt’s National Council for Childhood and Motherhood launched a nationwide campaign against bullying with the participation of the country’s big-name actors. Backers of the campaign have set up the popular trending hashtag #I’m_against_bullying.