Abusive teachers should not escape penalty

ALL THE FIRST-YEAR pupils in Yuhan Primary School in Linyi, East China's Shandong province, were instructed to hit themselves in the face 100 times by their teacher. Although later the teacher was transferred to another school, Jin Zegang, a professor of law at Tongji university, asked why such behavior went unpunished when there is a law against child abuse:

What happened in Linyi is not an isolated incident. There are countless reports about bad teachers that hurt small children physically and mentally.

Worse, every time such an incident happens, the schools and kindergartens always try to deny any responsibility and seek to protect their staff, while the judiciary always claims such behavior is not a crime. None of the teachers involved in the reported incidents has received any penalty.