The ‘Balcony child’: That’s the nickname he earned in the past 48 hours after a video shows his mother forcing him to jump from a window to another balcony of a high rise, amid his cries for help in Cairo, Egypt.
The video shows the 11-year-old boy crying and about to fall hanging from a high rise, while the mother screams at him to jump from a window to the balcony of their apartment.
The mother had ordered him to open the door to their house which he accidentally locked from inside.
Social media in Egypt was abuzz with comments and famous Egyptian artists started sharing the video, expressing their anger over the matter.
A famous actress, Wafa Amer, posted a video on her social media calling on human rights organizations and the government to move and save the boy from his abusive mother. She said that after she saw the video, she “could not sleep all night from the shock”.
She sent a message to the mother: “My sister passed away trying to conceive a child, many women dream to have children, you are not a mother and you don’t deserve him.”
After the child failed to jump to the balcony, he was grabbed back inside by his mother and beaten. While you can hear neighbors screaming to the mother that her son will fall and die, amid the boy cries of horor.
After the social media rage boiled over, the National Council for Motherhood and Childhood had filed a report to the Attorney General to investigate the matter.
The police later located the mother and the boy.
Local media reports states that the mother has four children and she works as a house keeper. On that day, she returned from work to find them playing in the street, and have locked themselves outside of the house, by forgetting the key inside.
She was very angry at her eldest, and forced him as a punishment to jump to the house balcony from a neighbour’s house window.
Prosecutors charged the mother with negligence and endangering the life of a child. She was released after signing a pledge not to expose her children to any form of abuse, and will be followed up by visits from social workers.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s Minister of Solidarity, Ghada Wali, had issued an order to put the child under rehabilitation, to be treated psychologically and socially.
She also ordered her ministry to evaluate the mother’s state of mind, and the family social status.
