INDIA
Times of India
Last Sunday VP Rajeena, a journalist in Kozhikode, Kerala, put up a Facebook post where she described the sexual abuse of children that she had witnessed in a madrassa where she had studied many years ago. What followed was a vicious outpouring of hate and threats. Indeed, there was such an avalanche of complaints against her post, complaints that she was trying to besmirch her religion, that Facebook was forced to block her account.
Rajeena, who works in a Malayalam newspaper, wrote about a teacher at a Kozhikode madrassa who allegedly groped male students. Young boys would be asked to unzip their pants and the teacher would proceed to touch them, she wrote. She also talked about another teacher who apparently abused little girls.
This could be a snapshot of child sex abuse from anywhere in the world. It should have evoked shock and outrage, consternation even, that here was one more example of the fact that the schools where we send our children to study are not safe havens of scholarship; they often harbour sexual predators who may prey on them and leave them psychologically scarred forever.
However, the anger that Rajeena’s post evoked was not directed at the paedophiles she talked about. The anger was directed at her. Online lynch mobs quickly gathered around and rained invectives on her because it was felt that by turning the spotlight on the evil of child sex abuse in a madrassa, which is an Islamic school, she was trying to discredit the schools, and by extension, the religion itself.
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