This whole thing becomes a super huge issue because the kid suffered a horrible injury and then died. There. I said it.

I guarantee you that if he didn’t die or didn’t suffer any sort of horrendous injury, we sadly would not even bat an eyelid. Why? Because our society is already immune to this type of culture. Like it or not, we subconsciously accept that ragging, bullying and corporal punishment is all ‘part of growing up’ regardless of whether it occurs in any tahfiz school, or any other type of schools (usually boarding) in our country

To me the real issue is, who do we make don’t know’ when other students are hit in schools? Because we have been desensitised, (maybe we went through the experience ourselves?) So we feel it’s ‘normal’ to physically hit a child.

What the child wrote in his journal was utterly heart-breaking and depressing. It seemed that nobody believed that he was being abused. Or nobody took him seriously. Or maybe they did believe him but told him to be a man and suck it up. A right of passage, seemingly.

Somehow we feel that its part of ‘growing up’, to be subject to a ‘little bit’ of punishment here and there. It has been ingrained in us to just follow and accept whatever is dished out to us. I cannot accept that.

I feel that the right to hit (or not to hit) a child lies with the parent, and no one else. I cannot tolerate it if someone else physically harms my children. I will most definitely flip out.

Children will be children. We are talking about seven- to 12-year-old kids sent to live away from their family, and then subject to the cruelest form of tyranny that abuses their physical and mental states. And some of us are still defending the aggressor? Whatever sin that they have committed surely does not warrant a walloping which by the looks of it seems more like an outlet for these ‘animals’ to vent their anger.

This is not about the ‘monster’ who ‘whipped’ that tahfiz kid. It is about all the monsters out there who have instilled a culture of fear and tyranny in the name of ‘education’.