More child abuse cases discovered, no solution found

 The mother of the three year old Nguyen Tran Hoa burst into crying when watching the video clip.

Vietnamese have been once again stunned by the images of the children violently beaten by the babysitters of Phuong Anh private nursery school in HCM City. They cannot understand why the women could behave so rudely to the small children.

The child abuse had not been discovered by the local authorities, parents or neighbors until one day a man provided the video clip to the police.

The parents of the abused children only knew about what happened after local newspapers showed the images, extracted from a video clip provided by a citizen to the police. The images turned up on a series of websites on December 17 and have been spread out rapidly.

The mother of Le Tuan Khang, one of the children, said she sometimes saw the black and blue body of the boy after he returned from the school. However, she thought the boy fell into the ground when playing. She could not imagine that a small innocent child could be beaten so ruthlessly.

The mother of the three year old Nguyen Tran Hoa burst into crying when watching the video clip. “I cannot imagine that my child suffered like this.”

The boy’s life has changed a lot since they he began going to the school. He does not have good sleep at night, but sometimes wakes up, cries and vomits. He likes to be put in stocks, strangles his mother and laughs.

The two babysitters Nguyen Le Thien Ly and Le Thi Dong Phuong have been arrested by the police. Vietnamese people have asked to punish the babysitters heavily for their “unpardonable offences.”

However, even if Ly and Phuong are heavily punished by the laws, the worries about the bad pre-school education quality still exist. It is highly possible that more child abuse cases and more wicked babysitters like Ly and Phuong would be found in the future.

The child abuse cases have been blamed on the local authorities who did not know what happened in their localities and did not take actions quickly to prevent the offences. Especially, people believe that half the responsibility needs to be blamed on the parents, who did not take care for the children well enough to discover the problems soon.

However, experts have pointed out that the core problem is in the fact that Vietnam is seriously lacking nursery schools.

Only few new schools are set up every year, while the number of children has been increasing so rapidly. As a result, parents have to send their children to household run nursery classes, the majority of which are badly equipped and unlicensed.

According to Le Hong Son, Director of the HCM City Education and Training Department, 12 non-state owned schools, 130 licensed household run classes and 84 unlicensed classes, which were inspected recently, could not meet the requirements in terms of the material facilities and teaching staff.

The department then asked the local authorities to stop the operation of the classes if the owners cannot upgrade the classes.

However, no one believes that the classes would shut down. Once the demand is still high, the classes would still be running despite their bad conditions.

Chi Mai