By Kim Se-jeong
The ruling Saenuri Party and the Ministry of Health and Welfare agreed Friday to shut down any daycare centers even if a single case of child abuse is reported there.
They also plan to require all daycare centers in the country to install surveillance cameras.
The measures came amid public uproar over a child abuse case in a daycare center in Incheon. Health Minister Moon Hyung-pyo and Saenuri Party Chairman Kim Moo-sung visited a daycare center in Seoul.
“We are working to react more quickly to abuse cases,” a health ministry official said. “We are trying to make rules more stringent for daycare centers to prevent possible abuses. The workers who are found to have abused children will also be deprived of their licenses.”
Under the current law, a shutdown applies only to facilities where a child dies as a result of abuse.
On Friday, police sought an arrest warrant for an Incheon daycare worker surnamed Yang, 33, for abusing a 4-year-old girl. Police detained Yang on Thursday for allegedly manhandling the girl just because she refused to eat kimchi.
Video footage showed Yang punching the girl harshly on her head for not eating the vegetable on her tray. The girl fell down on the ground with her legs in the air. She got herself together and knelt down before Yang who had the food tray in front of her. The situation ended with the teacher leaving the room and the girl picking up kimchi and putting it on her tray.
“I don’t know why (I was so harsh on her), but I think I lost my temper,” Yang said on Friday.
The police obtained testimony from other children and said she was suspected of abusing the children for a long time. The children called her “monster teacher.”
Yang denied the deliberate abuse, saying it was an isolated case and what she had done was out of love.
The embattled daycare center was shut down temporarily. The owner of the daycare center will soon be called in for questioning, according to the police. The child abuse case rattled the nation for the last two days, making mothers outraged. The story came to light after the girl’s mother reported to the police.
The new measures also included toughening qualifications for daycare center workers and enhancing the working environment for them. Almost 200,000 are employed by daycare centers.
Separately, on Friday, a similar case came to light in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province.
Local police said they were investigating an allegation that teachers at an English hagwon had abused students who were around 5 years old. Hagwon is a Korean term for private academic institutions.
A total of four teachers were apprehended in suspicion of abusing the children and neglecting the abuse.
Mothers who filed a request for the police investigation argued the teachers assaulted the children almost 20 times in the classroom between Sept. 30 and Nov. 4. “The teachers hit the children on their foreheads with their hands. They also made the students stand still looking at the wall inside a dark room,” a mother told the police.
The police obtained video footage and transferred the case to the sexual criminal division of the Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency, which oversees child abuse cases as well. The police said the accused denied the child abuse allegation arguing that it was a disciplinary action.