One teacher working at the RYB kindergarten in Beijing, that received national attention this week due to parents’ child abuse allegations, has been detained. The school’s headmaster has been immediately dismissed, Sina News reports on November 25.
The teacher, Liu X., is a 22-year-old female from Hebei province who worked at the kindergarten. She is suspected of the mistreatment of children.
Another person, a 31-year-old woman from Beijing, has reportedly been detained for fabricating “fake news” about members of the Chinese military “Tiger Regiment” (老虎团).
Over the past week, it was rumored around the internet that military officers were involved in an alleged wide-scale children’s sexual abuse network; the school’s headmaster’s husband is a retired member of the Tiger regiment. Chinese state media now report that the members of this unit have nothing to do with alleged cases of child molestation, and that these rumors are false.
In September, the ‘RYB Education’ company still rose on the New York stock exchange, but since the allegations of child abuse at its Beijing Xintiandi branch was exposed, its stocks have plummeted.
In 2015, the company, which operates up to 1800 kindergartens and day-care centers across 300 cities in China, also faced accusations of child abuse at one of its schools in Jilin. Four teachers of that branch were found guilty.
With more and more abuse cases at Chinese schools and kindergartens being exposed over the past year, Chinese state media are currently disseminating information online on how parents can teach children to protect themselves against (sexual) abuse, and how parents can look for signals their child is potentially being abused.
Many netizens are still wondering what further investigations into the RYB case will bring, and who the ‘naked uncle’ and ‘grandpa doctor’ are, who were mentioned in children’s stories about what had happened to them at school. “The person spreading rumors has been arrested, but what about the people who molested them?”, commenters ask.
“Fake news is not that scary, what is scary is that we do not yet know the truth,” one person wrote on Weibo.
By Manya Koetse
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