The recent report of the alleged sexual assault on a four-year-old girl in a school bus in Dubai has shaken the community. Gulf News readers in their thousands reacted to the news of the alleged incident, expressing outrage and recommending ways in which children should be protected by their guardians.
This month, Gulf News readers were invited to the newspaper’s head office to debate some of these suggestions and ask them about the obstacles caretakers are facing in ensuring child safety. Join the debate or send us your suggestions at readers@gulfnews.com.
Female attendants are the best solution to ensure child safety on school buses.
Swati Basu:
I cannot delegate my child’s safety, it is my concern. If you are vocal, whether with your child or with the school, it solves a lot of problems. Whenever I have spoken to my daughter’s school about any problems, they have taken action. I am very particular and pick my daughter up from school and drop her, but it is my choice.
Faruk Bhagani: The problem I think we face here is that everything is usually profit-motivated. And what happens is that you tend to take shortcuts with people. My daughter has had an experience, where she fell asleep in the school bus while coming back home and the driver forgot her in the bus and two hours later they realised that she was missing. The profit motivations have to be managed and my suggestion is that you raise the bar for the kind of people you are engaging with your children. There should be a minimum degree requirement, for even conductors and drivers.
Dr Tara Wyne: Normally I suppose in systems like the US and UK you can’t stipulate that all roles must be filled by educated people because you wouldn’t get those roles filled. But you have to have disclosure and [background checks] by police — not just for their stay in the country but however long they have been adults.
Faruk Bhagani: How do you do that with expatriates, because this is a transient community and there are very limited records?
Dr Tara Wyne: In the same way that you would if you were being assessed for immigration to Canada or Australia. Police checking is necessitated and you have to get agencies to do primary source verification.
Swati Basu: We have a tendency of hushing up things, especially in Asian cultures, and have an immense capacity for digesting things. That is not the right thing to do. Speak to your child, say it in different ways, don’t instill fear, instill confidence, so that your child knows which is the wrong touch and whether she should make a noise about it or not.
Rema Menon: There are so many families who are sharing accommodation, sometimes with bachelors. And there is every possibility that even that person is taking advantage of the child. So one has to be careful about who you trust, because often it is found that it is people that families trust who misuse that trust.
Tony Ross: We are all here for child safety, we are all on the same side. I can only speak for our school and can say that all of our drivers have a police clearance certificate and that’s reviewed on an annual basis. All our drivers have school bus training, which is an RTA certificate. And we must renew this every year. And our bus drivers get a special endorsed licence from the RTA. Since the inception of our school, we’ve only employed women bus assistants because this was actually made mandatory by the RTA. And they are not only bus assistants, they also work in the classroom. So all 35 of our bus assistants are called teacher’s assistants, which builds rapport and trust with the children. We also ensure that all the bus assistants have training with the RTA and once a year they have first aid training. We’ve also given them mobile phones with credit, so they can call our bus supervisor if there is an issue.
Dr Tara Wyne: I don’t know if we can entirely rely on one solution. I think the solution has to be multifaceted. The environment should have more deterrents for adults, so that people know that the penalties of abusing or hurting children are massive; that people are educated from the minute they step into the country and if you are in this line of employment, you are going to be under a lot of scrutiny.
Parents are still hesitant to raise the topic of abuse with children.
Faruk Bhagani: I grew up in the US and this was something that we were exposed to at a pretty young age. So, from a cultural perspective, my wife and I have absolutely no issues discussing very openly “good touch” and “bad touch”, crossing a line and really drilling that in because we’ve all had some sort of a personal experience. That’s another problem — it is a very rampant issue, especially in Western environments. So, I think it is very critical [to have that conversation]. What people have to come to grips with in this environment is that we are a very unusual place. We are a true example of East meets West, this place has evolved unbelievably in the past 40 years. So, people have to be able to step out of their cultural norms and say look, I live in a Western-oriented fast-paced environment. I need to come to grips with it and I need to educate my children about it.
Swati Basu: You just have to speak, there is no other solution. In Asian communities, the society plays a very important role. People are more concerned about the society than their own problems. They are so concerned about “what will people say?”. You have to go beyond that and live your life.
Dr Tara Wyne: I have lived in the UK in multicultural communities and I have lived here. Asian cultures are obviously collectivist, where it is all about the interest of the family and how people are perceived by the greater community. So, there is a different pressure on children and parents on what they are preserving, and one of the many important issues is honour and shame. And it is not that parents are not educated or don’t want to protect their children, but they are also trying to maintain a traditional sense of shyness and modesty with their children. They feel that this shyness that has been received through culture and the child’s innocence doesn’t need to be broken if I protect my children and their environment. But that’s a very large assumption.
Parents are unintentionally making children vulnerable to cyber abuse by giving them all the facilities but not monitoring them
Tony Ross: What I’m finding as someone who’s been involved with education for a long time is that there is a more insidious form of child abuse in our community and that is cyber bullying and cyber abuse. And what is being said on social network sites and texting is often of a sexual nature. A lot of parents don’t know what is happening on social network websites and mobile phones.
Faruk Bhagnai: You are talking about monitoring children, but you have to add that the constraints of today’s world are aggressive. Techonology, while great, has given us so many channels of information, you can’t monitor all of them. In my opinion, you have to scale your children into these things, not throw them over the fence and see what happens. That’s not going to work. You have to see the implications and think it through – my son is five years old. If I give him a PlayStation now, what happens? I completely start to derail any kind of the abilities that he needs to develop. But a lot of parents [do it] out of guilt, because they are so busy and inundated with things. You have to switch that off because that doesn’t work long term.
Rema Menon: More than anything else, many parents have a phobia, because they are not aware of [technological developments] and their children are far ahead.
Dr Tara Wyne: I don’t think parents are deliberately opening their children up to bad experiences. But indirectly, you are making your child vulnerable if you do not control the content and are not aware of what is going on in their life. That goes back to communicating with them from a very young age, about all of the issues that are related to them. You have to maximise the time that you functionally spend with children — so you spend breakfast together, you cook together, instead of watching so much television you sit and have a talk, take a walk together or get them to go shopping with you. Also when you are dropping them to their various appointments and social play dates you actually find out who their friend is, what did they do, how did they feel — I have realised that children are just thrilled to have an adult interested in them.
Rema Menon: Even the growth levels of individuals are different. Some children attain puberty earlier, some take time and they tend to compare, which can affect their self-esteem if everyone else has grown and they are still looking like a child. There can also be some comments made that can further aggravate them. He or she will come and talk to you if you leave those lines of communication open. If you don’t, you are losing out, and you have only yourself to blame.
Faruk Bhagani: What I’ve learned from my experience is that there is a strata of schools which are up to date technologically or psychologically, but then there is the middle tier as well, [which does not have as many facilities].
Tony Ross: I told my students about this debate, most of them are long-term bus travellers, and they said that you are wasting money with a GPS system and CCTV cameras on the bus. So I asked them what they thought would work and I think they were very good and intuitive with their suggestions. They said that mum and dad should make it a point to introduce themselves to the bus driver and attendant and for the first week make sure that they are there when the bus comes home. Then everyone will know that my mum and dad care and they are looking at you. Their second suggestion was sometimes we should just ring our parents or housekeeper telling them that we are about to reach. I think these were really good suggestions, and they cost nothing. Also, they said that every teacher in the school should adopt a bus. So, every day she should come and greet the bus driver and attendant so that they know that we are working on this together.
Dr Tara Wyne: Understanding the psyche of a potential abuser, you are absolutely right. They are looking for unattended children who are quieter and more vulnerable ... who are not going to shout about it and will be afraid and can be intimidated.
Swati Basu: The saddest part is that these cases have happened. I only wish that the parents had spoken about it. We wait too long. It is a problem present in every community. You just need to speak out.
Do you want to be a part of a similar live debate? Write to us at readers@gulfnews.com
