A television exposé revealed a disturbing practice inside a speech therapy center in China, wherein the staff resorted to physical and verbal abuse when handling deaf and mute toddlers who were there to be taken care of.
The video footage obtained by an undercover reporter shows the kids being hit, slapped and kicked by the workers in the facility in Jiangxi Province, Daily Mail reports.
The reporter, pretending to be a teacher, took videos of the gruesome treatment the so-called teachers were applying to the crying toddlers, who routinely got kicked in their bodies and slapped in their faces. Some use wooden sticks to beat the children’s hands.
In one clip, a worker can be heard threatening to feed a boy his own feces after he failed to go to the toilet as ordered. “If you soil your pants, you will have to eat your feces,” she screamed at the kid.
In the shocking report broadcast by Nanchang News on April 20, the workers claimed to be teachers at the Nanchang Hope Speech Therapy Centre, maintaining that the brutal punishments are meant to improve the children’s ability to speak.
“Don’t you use your brain? See how stupid you are,” screamed one teacher to the class. One teacher gave instructions to her students to call each other “pig heads.”.
“You must have thought this was cruel when you first started here, but this is all for their own good,” one teacher surnamed Yao told the undercover reporter.”They cannot speak, so crying can help them practice speaking.”
Another teacher, named Chen even advised the reporter to hit the pupils in the hidden area of the staircase because “no one would see.”
“You can take a glimpse outside the window to check if anyone is walking past,” Chen said.”If there is no one, you can take the pupils back there and hit them again.”
The facility’s head, Wu Xi, clarified that teachers are allowed to slap pupils as long as the slap does not land on their heads because it may damage the hearing aids that they wear on their heads.
The center’s unhygienic practices were also highlighted in the footage. There is one towel that can be seen being used by at least five to six kids to wipe their bodies. The children’s toothbrushes are also stored in one cup.
As for the facility’s head, she explained in an interview with Pear Video that the video was unfair and had been lifted out of context.
“There were many caring moments that the reporter did not show in the video,” said Wu. ”All it shows were the moment when the teachers lost their temper.”
