A Hong Kong police officer is under investigation after a video clip of him slapping and shouting at his 6-year-old son was shared widely among local netizens.
The video, which was reportedly obtained from a home security camera inside the family’s South Horizons apartment, is about 15 minutes long. In it, the man can be heard repeatedly calling his son “a piece of trash” and telling him to “go die”.
At one point, he said to his son, “I told you to teach your little sister but you couldn’t do it, what’s the point of teaching her bad things? You’re causing me and your mother to fight all the time. You’re really a piece of trash, why don’t you hurry up and die? I won’t be living here soon, you can all go die.”
The man then kicked the boy and repeatedly slapped him with a pair of slippers, even as the child cried in pain. In his anger, he even knocked over a shelving unit that was next to his son.
According to Ming Pao, the clip was filmed on January 13 and resulted in the boy being taken to Queen Mary Hospital for an examination. A social worker at the hospital allegedly told the boy’s mother not to report her husband to the police, as it would affect his job and have a negative impact on the family. A representative for the hospital told Ming Pao that it could not comment on a case without the patient’s consent.
The video was posted online by a netizen claiming to be the woman’s friend, who said that the man in the clip was a police officer in the traffic division. “He’s been beating that boy since he was three years old. The kid is always covered in bruises and scrapes,” the poster wrote. According to the post, the man has a history of physically abusing his wife, and the couple is currently in the process of obtaining a divorce.
After the video was shared widely by furious netizens this week, a police spokesman gave a statement saying that the case had been referred to the Child Abuse Investigation Unit for Hong Kong Island. Police are urging anyone who has information related to the case to come forward.
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