Four-Year Old Makes Big Mistake

Four-Year Old Makes Big Mistake

4 -year-old Accused of Improperly Touching Teacher

Dec 8, 2006 11:51 PM

BELLMEAD- A four-year-old hugged his teachers aide and was put into in-school suspension, according to the father. But La Vega school administrators have a different story.

Damarcus Blackwell's four-year-old son was lining-up to get on the bus after school last month, when he was accused of rubbing his face in the chest of a female employee.

The prinicipal of La Vega Primary School sent a letter to the Blackwells that said the pre-kindergartener demonstrated "inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment."

Blackwell says it's ridiculous that the aide would misread a hug from a four-year-old. Blackwell wrote to administrators demanding that the whole incident be expunged from his son's academic file because his son is too young to know what it means to act sexually.

David Davis, the executive director of the Advocacy Center in Waco tends to agree with Blackwell. He says assuming the boy has not had sexual encounters, or been inappropriately exposed to pornography, most four-year-olds are sexually innocent.

Blackwell got a response from the La Vega administration. The sexual references on the discipline referral were removed. But the thing that makes Blackwell most upset is they told him "your request for an apology by the aide and removal of all paperwork regarding this incident is denied." Now the young student's file will refer to the incident as "inappropriate physical contact." And Blackwell says he will continue to fight the district.

La Vega I.S.D. administrators told News Channel 25 they couldn't comment on this case because of student privacy issues.

29 **Boys** Died In Prison

Yep; from what I could tell from the list of names shown by the BBC's Newsnight programme, they were ALL boys.

But the BBC Newsnight team did not mention this fact throughout the programme. The deaths were said to be those of 'children'.

Here is the blurb from the Newnight website; ...

Twenty-nine children have died in custody in England and Wales since 1990. A terrible set of unlinked individual tragedies or an illustration of the inability of the prison system to cope with the vulnerable young people entrusted to its care? We jail nearly 3,000 children between the ages of 10 and 17 every year. But is it doing any of us - society or the children themselves - any good?

The latest in our series Generation Next investigates what it means to be a child in custody.

Can you imagine how the Newsnight team - and the whole of the media - would have presented this item of news had even the majority of deaths been of girls? - let alone all of them.

Indeed, despite the fact that some 10 times more male than female prison inmates commit suicide in UK prisons, Newsnight has had two stories focusing on female inmate suicides but none, as far as I am aware, that focus on male suicides.

And the reason for this is that the BBC is always at pains to actively hide any suffering that men and boys might be enduring.