A 14-year-old girl named Fanli Lahingide, who attended a junior high school in West Mapanget district in the North Sulawesi capital of Manado, died yesterday after she was given a physical punishment in school.
According to reports, her teacher, who is identified by the initials CS, made Fanli and a few other students run laps on the school grounds as punishment for being late to school and missing the morning assembly. As Fanli entered her second lap, she collapsed on the ground and lost consciousness.
Fanli was then taken to the hospital, but passed away less than an hour later.
Local police are still waiting on autopsy results to determine Fanli’s cause of death, and no criminal charges have been made in relation to the incident.
Corporal punishment is quite common in Indonesian schools, with stories of teachers using needlessly harsh — and sometimes abusive — disciplinary methods coming up with depressing regularity.
Over the past couple of years, there have been several disturbing instances of teachers giving cruel and unusual punishments for little children, such as a teacher who ordered an elementary student to lick a toilet as punishment for forgetting his homework, a teacher who roughed up a kindergartener and another who forcibly cut off her student’s hair as punishment.
Between these and cases in which students use violence against their teachers, such as a junior high schooler who recently came to school armed with a sickle demanding his confiscated phone back, some would say there’s a disturbing culture of violence in Indonesia’s schools.
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