BEIJING: A kindergarten teacher in China has been suspended from her job and placed under police investigation for using a glue gun to scald a little girl’s lip, causing serious blisters.
The incident unfolded on the morning of May 27 in a nursery in Fengxian county, Jiangsu province, eastern China.
According to surveillance footage from the classroom, the woman children’s teacher let some children queue up to receive punishment one by one because she was angry that they were talking during class, the China News Weekly reported.
The teacher, surnamed Chen, first used the glue gun to touch a boy’s palm. The boy instantly drew back his hand before the teacher beat him and let him go.
Chen then dragged a girl, 4, in front of her. She scalded the girl’s upper lip twice with the glue gun as the girl tried to evade it.
A male teacher in a nearby in the classroom did not intervene, the surveillance video showed.
In the evening, the girl’s lip developed blisters which worsened and began to ooze pus, making the girl cry from the pain.
The girl’s parents rushed her to hospital and called the police.
“We watched the surveillance records with the police. I felt heartbroken when I saw the scene,” the girl’s mother Zhou was quoted as saying.
“I do not know how serious the mistake, made by a four-year-old girl, was. Why was she so cruel to my daughter?” asked Zhou.
The mother said the footage record was at odds with what the teacher had told them about the girl’s injury.
Chen initially said the wound was made by the girl herself, and later changed her story to say that she hurt the girl by accident.
The glue gun is a handicraft tool and Chen was preparing for pupils to use it to make artworks to decorate the classroom.
The case is still being investigated.
The local education authority said it has sent some teachers to provide psychological counselling for pupils in the class and ordered the kindergarten to strengthen teachers’ ethics education.
Child abuse incidents frequently make headlines in China.
In 2024, three teachers in eastern Jiangxi province were fired after a four-year-old boy’s parents revealed that they had slapped their boy in the face and locked him in a dark room multiple times.
Last year, a kindergarten teacher in northeastern Liaoning province was sentenced to two years in jail for abusing a young girl.
The teacher often slapped the girl’s face, kicked her legs and tugged her hair to push her against a wall. The girl suffered scalp injuries and psychological problems as a result. - South China Morning Post
