June 19, 2013
A protester whose sign reads: ‘Principals, Get A Room with Me! Leave Elementary School Students Alone! Call Number 12338 for Ye Haiyan.’ 12338 is a hotline set up by All-China Women’s Federation. Photo via Weibo.
“Principal, get a room with me, leave the school kids alone” has become a popular phrase in China over the past few weeks. The trend had its beginnings on May 8th when the principal of the Wanning No. 2 Primary School in Hainan spent a night in a hotel with a government officer and six schoolgirls who were between 11 and 14 years old. The two men were accused of raping the girls, yet the police and authorities tried to cover the situation up as best they could. The official medical investigation showed that the girls’ hymen had not been ruptured, although the parents claimed the opposite, insisting that their daughters had been bleeding days after the incident.
Finally, the authority could not stand the pressure and the People’s Procuratorate of Hainan Province prosecuted the suspicious principal and officer for rape. Within 20 days, many other cases of child molestation at the hands of teachers were exposed. Now people are outraged.
Mrs. Ye Haiyan, a women and children’s rights advocate, was the first to protest. Ye and her supporters traveled for hours by train and ferry to reach the Wanning No. 2 Primary School. For the next three hours they stood in front of the school, under the sweltering sun, and held placards with the words “Principal, get a room with me, leave the school kids alone” written on them. That day the demonstration seemed to provoke no response from the school’s authority.
Their revenge came soon, however. After Ye returned home to Guangxi Province, where she lives with her daughter, nine men and two women broke into the house and attacked her. Ye grabbed a kitchen knife and hurt three of the invaders in self-defense, but because of the violence she was taken away and detained by the police.
Ye’s arrest has since triggered a wave of mocking protests. Images of men, women, cartoon figures, and even pets posing with placards bearing the same, increasingly popular sentence, have appeared online. All invite the principal to have sex with them instead of the kids. Two Japanese actresses working in Beijing made the same request. Their actions spurred heated discussion: “Do we need Japanese women to safeguard the virginity of our children?” The Global Times. criticized the behavior of the Japanese actresses as “offending the business ethic,” but this time, even the Chinese citizens were on the Japanese actresses’ side and have been chastising the official media, saying, “It’s the dirty guys and the authority, not the young Japanese actresses, who lack morality and ethics.”
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