Sarcastically, his school is called “The Martyrs School of Port Said”. An even a more cynical fact, his name is Islam and his killer is a seemingly – and by seemingly I mean he has a long beard and a terrifying expression on his face – religious prestigious teacher. This is the story of the murder of a boy, very young Egyptian boy who did nothing to deserve such fate. This is the story of Islam, a fifth grader and his mother’s only child, killed by beating, a phenomenon that is widespread in Egypt.
Armed with the discrete approval of many parents and the negligence of the education administrators in Egypt, many teachers use battery and many other forms of abuse as a part of ‘discipline’ they believe is necessary to bring back the ‘old manners’ back. Corporal punishment is thus considered a primary tool to keep children in order.
It is difficult to root such a problem, especially when there are still people defending this kind of behavior and go as far as demanding it. Moreover, a mixture of extreme military governing, intolerant upraising methods, low self-esteem, misogyny, sexism, radicalism has created a generation suffering from God syndrome and sociopathy combined. Men and women who treat children as hollow vessels that only exists to fill up with their excess of emotions and psychological deficits.
Patriarchal norms considering, not only how men treat women, but also how they treat children and elderly, are actually declining in a slope of human rights and common sense. There has been a number of incidents similar to Islam’s, at the same time of the marked rise in violence directed at Egyptian protestors by the Egyptian military.
This clearly shows that abuse and violence is a social trend, and the ‘Pack mentality’ that governs any undereducated majority nation is a malignancy that can slowly take over the entire country. In the latest report from the Population Reference Bauru, not only half of Egyptians under 16 years old have experienced physical violence, but also most of them have noted that the perpetrator justified that abuse in one way or the other.
Violence in Egypt is not the problem of the laws or how to enforce them properly; it is the problem of social norms and herd behavior that is far, far harder to reform.
