Singaporean mother makes police report about school beatings

Once in a while there's a story on social media that makes me react and today, I have stumbled upon one such story on social media: a mother in Singapore Mrs Claire Chee has made a police report after the disciplinary master in a primary school in Singapore had caned her son without first informing her. The law in Singapore states that this kind of punishment is still permissible on the basis that the parents are first informed - it doesn't state whether or not the parents have to consent to it, they just have to be informed. When confronted, the disciplinary master at the school plain lied (like the idiot he was) that he merely 'tapped' her son with the cane, but that's a lie because the boy in question had severe welts left on the skin which were a result of a beating rather than a tap - so that's the part that got me angry of course, because the teacher in question clearly lied when he realized that he had broken the rules by not informing the parents first before administering the beating, but clearly the mother in question is not dumb enough to be fooled and she did the right thing by making a police report. I sincerely hope the teacher will not just lose his job but be sent to jail - but I have very little faith in the Singaporean system. So, that's the story, allow me to analyze all the things that are seriously wrong with the system. So I need to give you a disclaimer first: my parents are retired primary school teachers in Singapore and my regular readers will know that I had an awful relationship with them, so perhaps I am somewhat biased. Let this be a test of my skills as a writer to demonstrate to you that I can be impartial when talking about this topic and if I fail, then I am a very bad writer. But if I manage to make a few valid points successfully, then please do let me know what you think.

No ifs, no buts - caning children is wrong.

Problem 1: You cannot trust all parents. 

The first point I want to make is that teachers and parents are offered unconditional respect in Singaporean culture - the problem with children under the age of 12 is that they really have no choice in the matter. Say if you're a child encountering an abusive teacher in school, who can you run to for help? Even if the child wanted to make a police report, the first thing the police would do is to contact the parents of the child before any investigation is launched. Thus in this context, the child would turn to his/her parents for help but you're then dependent on the parents being reasonable and rational like Mrs Chee in this story. But we should not have to depend on parents to be the ones to check on their kids to make sure that they aren't being physically abused in school - in an ideal world, you'll like to think that you can rely on parents to care about the welfare of their children but that's not always the case. So when presented with such a situation where the parents find evidence that the child was beaten at school by the teachers, the parents may or may not react in a rational manner - let's not assume that all parents know how to deal with such a situation or are even aware of the options available. A parent may choose not to confront the teacher or make a report for the following reasons. This list could go on and on of course, but there are so many reasons why a parent may hesitate to make a report or complaint:

• The parent may actually believe that the child had been genuinely naughty and thus deserved the beating, thus effectively condoning the teacher's decision to punish the child like that even if it is physical abuse. 
• The parent may have little faith in the system because the teacher could lie about the whole incident about how the welts got there, given that there had been a fight involved in this story, the teacher could easily cook up a story that the welts were inflicted during the fight. It then becomes a case of the child's word vs the teacher's version of the story and even I have little faith in the system at that point to deal with abusive teachers. 
• The parent may be afraid that the teacher may bear a grudge against the child if a complaint or police report is filed, thus the child could be maliciously excluded for the rest of the year and that could lead to poor results. "You wanna wreck my career as a teacher? I will wreck your child's year at school and he will never pass an exam for the rest of the year. Your child will pay dearly and you will regret ever making that complaint." Spiteful teachers do exist.
• The parents may simply be working such extremely long hours that they don't have enough time to address the issue properly and choose to ignore it despite knowing what happened. Neglectful parents exist you know.
• There are parents who may be very ashamed that in going to the police with such a report, they may think that it reflects poorly on them for having brought up a child that gets into trouble in school in the first place. 

Problem 2: No, you cannot trust all teachers and those in a position of trust.

Allow me to add that whilst I work full time in corporate finance, I am also a fully trained gymnastics coach and a volunteer at my local gymnastics club - so even as a volunteer, it is compulsory for me to attend a safeguarding children and child protection course. The major focus is to try to spot children who have been subjected to some kind of abuse: be it peer bullying or physical/sexual abuse by their parents. After all, you need to undergo some training in order to be qualified as a sports coach or a teacher, before you are trusted to be put in charge of young children. Furthermore, all teachers and coaches will have a supervisor type character (a headmaster, principal, head teacher or head coach/club manager) to ensure that they are doing their job properly. However, anyone can have children no matter how stupid or irresponsible they are and this safeguarding programme recognizes that there are a lot of very bad parents out there. Thus the programme is putting the onus on the trained professionals in a position of trust to be there to spot signs of abuse when it happens. But what if the person being abusive is the teacher - the teacher who is supposed to be the trained professional whom we're supposed to trust? Do we have a robust enough system to deal with abusive teachers or is the system set up in a way where teachers and others in positions of trust get away with all kinds of wrongdoing? Even if you're not a gymnastics fan, I'm sure you would be aware of the USA Gymnastics scandal where national team doctor Larry Nassar was jailed for life for sexually abusing many gymnasts on the national team for decades. That's a good example of when the system gets it very wrong by putting way too much faith in those who are in a position of trust.

I'm not saying that all teachers cannot be trusted - this wouldn't be fair to a lot of good teachers out there who have been doing an amazing job. What I am saying however is that there needs to be a much higher level of scrutiny when it comes to teachers in the workplace, those teachers who are doing a good job will not have anything to hide and it will only be the teachers who think that the rules don't apply to them who will have something to fear. Unfortunately in Singapore, the culture is such that children are expected to offer unconditional respect to their parents and teachers, even though we know darn well that you simply cannot expect all parents and teachers to be rational, reasonable people you can trust. Some parents are good, some are downright criminal - by the same token, some teachers are excellent and some should have been sacked or even jailed a long time ago. The problem is that a lot of Asian parents default to the position where children must respect their elders because they fear being challenged by their own children; they would much rather have the luxury of unconditional respect from their children rather than have to earn their children's respect. Certainly, that was pretty much the cultural norm that many Singaporean kids grew up with and perhaps some younger parents these days are more enlightened about earning their children's respect and trust. But we need a system which recognizes that children need someone to turn to if they are failed by both their parents and teachers - in the UK, at least we have Childline a charity which recognizes that there are a lot of neglected and abused children out there in the UK, it is a last resort but at least children in that position have somewhere to turn to. Whom can the neglected and abused children of Singapore turn to if they've been failed by both their parents and teachers or would society just ignore them?

I don't want this to sound like an attack on the system in Singapore, my regular readers of my blog will know that I had a difficult childhood whereby I didn't get along at all with my parents. I often ran away from home and was in trouble all the time. However, it took the intervention of two gymnastics coaches and a teacher to make sure that I didn't go off the rails - so really, I owe so much to those two coaches and that teacher for having stepped in and parented me in a way that my parents never did. Thus I don't want you to think that I am simply condemning a system that I was a product of, it's more complex than that. However, I want to make it very clear that these two coaches and that teacher went above and beyond what was expected of them to be kind to me, to take care of me when I was a difficult teenager always getting into trouble. I was reliant on the kindness of strangers to help me, it wasn't the 'system' that somehow safeguarded me when it spotted that I was a vulnerable teenager who was about to go off the rails. I was very lucky to have met kind people along the way who went above and beyond what was expected of them in their role as coaches/teachers to help me - I'm just saying that the system needs to be more robust in a way that doesn't leave vulnerable, suicidal, troubled teenagers at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. I had been incredibly lucky and I'm pointing out that we shouldn't take that kindness of strangers for granted and assume that someone kind or helpful will always step in to help out of the goodness of their hearts; the system really needs to be better equipped and organized to help troubled young people. 

Problem 3: We don't know how to deal with this issue so it is swept under the carpet. 

Oh we have already discussed this on my blog before and I have made my stance extremely clear on this: the rules of corporal punishment in Singapore are wrong. It should be outlawed under any circumstances and any teacher found guilty of breaking the rule should be arrested - the teacher should not only be barred from teaching but face criminal charges because it is simply ridiculous for a grown adult to hit a child in the name of punishment. I know this issue intimately well because my siblings and I were hit a lot as children because my parents had serious anger management issues. My parents had a 'hit first explain later (or never)' approach to discipline. For many years, I had a major disagreement with my second sister about this. Look, my eldest sister can't even talk about the abuse she suffered, her way of dealing with it is to pretend it never happened but at least my second sister is willing to argue with me about it (which I think it a healthier approach). So for many years my sister berated me for holding a grudge against our parents' abusive behaviour: she claimed I was ungrateful and intolerant but I rejected her reasoning. It was easier for her to believe that she had a bad brother than bad parents. You see, they abused me less than they abused her - my sister thought it was because I was a boy, so they didn't punish me as severely as they punished her. Whilst that may have been true, I also believe it was because I would stand up to them, argue with them and I even ran away from home on a few occasions whilst my two sisters would simply give in to my abusive parents rather than question their authority. I also believe that I can be emotionally supportive to my sister without agreeing with her choices or even condoning our parents' bad behaviour. I can love my sister whilst still taking a stance on the way my parents failed us in many ways. The way my two sisters have reacted is quite typical whilst my reaction is more unusual within the context of Singapore. 

Thus my sister's rationale was that if she was willing to put up with everything she went through and not kick up a fuss, then since I suffered less than she did then I have no excuse or reason to voice any kind of complaint or dissatisfaction with the situation. I suffered less than her but it was not as if I was spared the abuse - far from it. Being my older sister, she has no problem berating me, telling me I am wrong and judging me, but she finds it a lot harder to subject our own parents to the same harsh judgement because she is conditioned by our culture to think and act a certain way. Culturally, she finds it nearly impossible to confront the abuse her parents had inflicted on her. I pointed out to her that my rebellion had made her feel uncomfortable about her choice to put up with my parents no matter how unreasonable or abusive they had been - especially if they treated her even worse than me, then she had even more of an excuse to walk away and say, "I'm an adult now, I'm starting a new life and you're not a part of it - I won't even let you near my children as I don't trust you near children." I know that my sister is struggling to reconcile two opposing forces: culturally, she is conditioned to want be seen as a filial daughter but deep inside, I know she is bitter about the abuse during her childhood that she endured for so many years without complaining. She has chosen to be filial, thus that choice has forced her to turn a blind eye to her own pain and anguish that stems from the abuse she suffered as a child in the name of filial piety. But in doing that, she is merely censoring her own memories and sweeping the issue under the carpet rather than taking a stance against this aspect of our culture. If my sister chooses to deal with her demons this way, that's her personal choice - but what if the majority of adults in our society adopt the same approach and we collectively sweep the issue under the carpet because none of us know how to deal with it apart censoring our painful memories of physical abuse? 

The fact is so Singaporeans who are my age or older would have been beaten by their parents as children and for them to stand up and say, "beating children is wrong" would mean admitting that what they had gone through as children is wrong and by that token, it would also mean that their parents were abusive and bad parents. But this is never a simple issue - for many people, sure they did have to endure a lot of beatings as a child but they also had some happy memories from their childhood and their method of dealing with it is to simply censor the unhappy memories whilst simply focusing on the happier times - a lot of people do that and I'm certain that's the approach that my eldest sister has taken. This is a form of selective amnesia, it is like going through your laptop and phone and simply choosing to delete certain files from your memory. This is actually far more common than you think: if it is simply a tactic to deal with a traumatic period in your past, then that's a personal decision that someone like my sister may take. But if we do that collectively as a society by avoiding the topic despite the fact that so many of us are suppressing traumatic memories of abuse, then the topic is merely ignored as the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about or is willing to address openly. That is why we have this wishy-washy position in the law right now in Singapore where this kind of corporal punishment is still permitted but only after the parents are informed - what is the point of that last caveat? It seems like nobody has the guts to say, "this is wrong, I don't care if Singaporeans have accepted this in the past - we are outlawing it as of now because it is the right thing to do and so we are recognizing that what was condoned in the past is unacceptable today."

Problem 4: People are unwilling to challenge their cultural norms. 

This is always a tricky issue because people often draw a lot of their identity from their culture and in the case of Chinese Singaporeans, many of them naturally defend anything that consider to be a part of their culture even if it doesn't make sense. Hence this kind of 'spare the rod spoil the child' mentality has been generally considered a form of Asian parenting that Amy Chua wrote about in her famous book, Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mum. You'll be amazed the amount of crap that people will tolerate in the name of culture - there are some people who have little to be proud of. Maybe they didn't do well at school, perhaps they struggled through further education and ended up doing some kind of awful job that doesn't pay well at all - there's really little that they can look back upon to say, "see? I achieved all that, I'm so proud of what I have done." No, if they tried to do that, they'll be embarrassed by how little they have achieved. So instead, they attach their pride and self-worth to their Chinese culture and suddenly they are proud of one of the world's oldest and most influential cultures that goes back over 4000 years - so people who end up doing that will put their culture on a pedestal and base their identity and self-worth on their culture. People like that will never challenge aspects of it that are ridiculous. Thus when their identity, self-worth and self-esteem gets so wrapped up in their culture, they completely lose their objectivity and will become seemingly oblivious to the atrocities (such as the physical abuse of children) carried out in the name of their culture. This isn't a uniquely Chinese problem, but a common problem in many Asian and African societies because we're often told to be 'proud' of our culture without actually thinking about what that actually means.

Problem 5: Some people get very defensive about their awful parenting/teaching methods.

Another line I hear very often is this, "I was beaten as a child and it did me no harm, it taught me how to respect my elders; young people today need to learn more discipline." Or some variant of that, it is often shared by older people on social media and I totally disagree with that. What I read into that is that they have become their parents - they probably smack their kids when they get impatient with them and don't have the patience to try to reason with their children. However, they try to justify their actions by claiming how they are perfectly fine today and that suggests a lot of insecurity - allow me to share with you an incident I witnessed on a train whilst traveling to Scotland. There was a young mother with a baby and that baby started crying; the young mother didn't seem to know how to pacify the baby - she tried a few things but none of that worked, so she had little choice but just let the baby continue crying. This older lady noticed, she probably meant well and walked over to try to help, she introduced herself as Carol and said that she has children and many grandchildren. Carol then made a mistake - before establishing any kind of rapport with the young mother, she immediately started lecturing the young mother about why babies may be crying and how to deal with the situation. Don't get me wrong, I think her intentions were noble and she was genuinely trying to help but the young mother then suddenly got defensive and said, "what makes you think I need your help? You don't know anything about my baby. Are you suggesting I don't know what I am doing? Leave us alone, please stop bothering me, look you're upsetting my baby!" Defeated, Carol simply said, "okay, I'm very sorry I didn't choose the right words, I was really only trying to help. I shall go now." Carol then walked away but the baby never stopped crying and I thought damn that young mother could have really done with some help there from a very experienced grandmother in that situation but her insecurity got in the way.

So when I hear people say things like, "I was beaten as a child and it did me no harm", what I think they mean is, "I beat my children the way my parents used to beat me, I've turned into my father/mother and I don't want anyone to think that there's anything wrong with that." However, I get very concerned when a parent thinks that they are beyond reproach and that their parenting methods are perfect - seriously? Because all I hear is someone being so defensive when any reasonable parent would gladly concede that no parent can ever be 'perfect' and if there are ways to become a better parent, they would gladly try to improve. The incident involving Carol and the young mother on the train demonstrates how some parents can get very defensive when their parenting skills are challenged - this suggests that they don't want to be seen as bad parents who don't know what they are doing or are somehow neglecting and/or harming their children. But that's a completely different motivation altogether - not wishing to be seen as a bad parent is not the same as a genuine desire to be a good parent. The fundamental difference is that if you don't want to be seen as a bad parent, you really don't care if you are making some mistakes (even quite serious mistakes with grave consequences), as long as nobody notices those mistakes and judges you for them. Yes Carol's approach could have been executed a little bit more tactfully, but if that young mother was genuinely concerned for her baby's welfare, then she really should have put her insecurity and feelings aside and accepted help from Carol. Thus is it important to recognize insecurity when we see it rather than accept it as, "well that's just them expressing their opinion." No, it is actually them expressing their insecurity. 

Problem 6: Parents and teachers are going for the easier but wrong option.

Another reason why punishing a child by beating is so wrong is because you're sending the wrong message to the child - that somehow using physical violence, by inflicting pain you're fixing the problem. That never works because the message the child gets is that when adults lose their temper and/or patience, they will hit you - that's the message that children will take away if adults do not take the time and the trouble to explain to children why what they have done is so wrong. Don't get me wrong, I understand how difficult a challenge it can be. I remember this instance at my gymnastics club, this young gymnast was struggling with her handstand and I told her to think about her center of gravity. She gave me a blank stare and said, "sorry, my center of ...what? I don't understand." That's when I realized, oh goodness me she's a child, she doesn't understand the concept of center of gravity - how do I even begin to explain this to her when she hasn't even learnt about this in school? Oh trying to communicate concepts like that to children is an art form - one that I am not good at. A lot of adults who choose to hit children make the ridiculous assumption that the beating is enough to deter the child from behaving like that again but that's hardly the same thing: do you want the child to change their behaviour because they are afraid of receiving a beating or do you want the child to understand why they have done something wrong in the first place? It may take hours, even days to try to explain a complex concept to a child but it takes just seconds to hit a defenseless young child - many Asian parents opt for the latter because they're simply bad parents who have no patience to attempt the former but in doing so, they have sent the wrong message to their children.

Problem 7: Fear is no substitute for communication and understanding. 

In this story, the school's policy is to offer counseling after the beating is administered which I think is just plain stupid - what is the point of the beating then if it is the counseling that actually addresses the underlying issues of why the child got into trouble in the first place? Can we not just fast forward to the counseling which is the really constructive part of the process? And if a child needs some kind of punishment after breaking the rules, that's fine - but there are so many ways to punish a child without resorting to physical violence: you can make the child stay back and clean the classroom, you can make the child do a public apology, you can make the child write a letter acknowledging wrongdoing and demonstrate understanding about how his behaviour needs to be improved. Inflicting pain reduces children to the level of animals and criminals - I had just been traveling in Argentina and they have a lot of two things there: cattle and criminals. You can't reason with either of them even if you speak Spanish fluently, so will actually see a lot of electric fences in Argentina to keep cows in their farms and criminals out of private properties (and electric fences are also used to deter thieves from stealing the best cattle from some ranches) because even cows and criminals are afraid of pain. Should children be treated with the same level of contempt? No of course not, you should never assume that children cannot respond to reason. In choosing to use the threat of pain to discipline children and coerce them to follow the school rules, you are assuming that they cannot respond to reason and the only way to get through to them is by using the fear of pain. I think that's plain wrong and teachers need to do their job properly: they should never use fear or pain to control the class, fear is never a reasonable substitute for proper communication because our children don't deserve to be treated like criminals or cattle. Teachers need to use their words and not resort to physical violence to control the class.

Problem 8: You can't fight fire with fire. 

You can't punish children for fighting with more physical violence as it doesn't solve anything. If the system condones it, then the system is stupid. If society allows it, then society is wrong. In this story, the boy in question was punished for having gotten into a physical altercation with a classmate. Whilst I don't dispute the fact that boys at that age can be very badly behaved, choosing to beat them for getting into a fight will not send the right message to them - it merely teaches the boys not to fight whilst in school if they don't want to be beaten by the teachers, it does nothing to address the deeper issues to help them develop the vital social skills to try to resolve difficult social conflicts. I know exactly why the teachers chose to beat the boys in this case: it is obvious. The teachers themselves have short tempers, little patience nor time and for them, it is far quicker to beat the boys up rather than to spend time explaining to them why what they did was wrong and then try to teach them the vital social sills needed to resolve social conflicts. I know this because that's exactly the kind of bad parenting I was subjected to as a child. Allow me to share with you a story from my gymnastics club which happened a while back. A coach was trying to deal with a situation where two siblings in his class were fighting and he couldn't deal with the situation whilst still having to teach the rest of the class, so I stepped in and took the two fighting siblings aside. Let's call them Jack and Jill  (not their real names): so I started by asking Jack why he hit his sister and he claimed, "she started it first, she hit me first!" The moment there was the slightest hint of any disagreement between these two siblings, their very first reaction is to hit one another instead of using words to express themselves. 

So I forced them to talk about their feelings - it was something that they clearly hadn't done before given that both of these children had rather poor social skills. Yes they fought all the time but there were more punches than words exchanged and somehow, I had managed to open a Pandora's box and once it was opened, the stories came pouring out. There were so many pent up frustrations about incidents that went back many years, but instead of using words to express their feelings and try to achieve a resolution, they simply hit one another. This was mostly because their parents often threatened to hit them - I was not able to ascertain whether or not their parents followed through with those threats but let me give you an example. Jill would ask her mother if she would have an an ice cream and  her mother would say no but when Jill persisted and asked her parents why she could not have that ice cream, her mother would threaten to hit her if she didn't shut up at once rather than go into a conversation like, "let's talk about snacking between meals - why do you want to eat that ice cream in the middle of the afternoon? Are you really hungry? Do you think it is healthy to eat snacks like ice cream when you are just bored rather than hungry? Even if you are hungry, do you think you should be eating something like an apple or an ice cream? Do you know what it means to have a balanced diet?" No, her parents didn't have the social skills to try to engage their children like that, so instead, the usual response was, "shut up or I will hit you." That's why Jack and Jill copied their parents with this, "shut up or I will hit you" threat - except of course, they did often hit each other and so clearly, they had bad parents who had actually set a very poor example for conflict resolution.

Was this a situation I could fix in 30 minutes? Of course not, the root of the problem was that Jack and Jill had very poor social skills but at least it was a start. I managed to get Jack and Jill to speak to each other about their feelings and whilst what I did may seem like common sense, their parents would have never done that - they would have just threatened to hit them if they didn't shut up. It was shocking to me that their parents were not interested in talking to their own children to understand why they were fighting: they had bad parents. At times, I had to stand between them as they got emotional because their first instinct would be to stand up and simply hit the other person when their words failed them. I had to say things like, "Jack, sit down. Calm down. Use your words. I know you are upset but I need you to use your words to tell me and your sister what you are feeling now and explain to us why you feel that way." Was this an unconventional way to deal with the situation? Perhaps - if I may be frank, Jack and Jill said a lot of horrible things to each other, there was a lot of swearing. I didn't censor them as I wanted to encourage them to use their words rather than their fists to resolve their conflicts. It was a start and I hope I taught them something useful that day - I wasn't interested in punishing them for fighting, I wanted to teach them how to handle such situations in the future. All too often children are expected to be seen and not heard, they are expected to keep quiet rather than express themselves but this will only lead to children having poor social skills. Children do not develop social skills if they are simply conditioned to keep quiet and certainly beating the crap out of them is no substitute for proper lessons to help them develop vital social skills to handle social conflicts. The fact that we were beaten as children and that teachers used to do this crap to us is no excuse to tolerate or condone it - we need to offer our children something much better than the hideous bullshit we were subjected to a generation ago. 

So that's it from me on this issue - I've made my stance extremely clear about having zero tolerance when it comes to beating children. I just want to end by saying this: please don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that children should be raised in a consequence free environment where they get away with murder. Quite the contrary, I believe children can be punished in a variety of ways which involves the removal of privileges and these will convey to them the severity of their offence but I think that so much harm is done the moment an adult hits a child that it can never ever be justified under any circumstances. Of course many adults still do it because they are terrible parents and teachers who lose their temper and hit their children/students, that's why we need clarification in the law that this must be completely illegal and any adult found guilty of it should be treated like a criminal. And if you think that I'm talking about my own parents, you're right. I shall end on that note, do let me know your thoughts - so, leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.