Unable to face his father after failing a school test, 13-year-old Class VI student, Raza, decided to end his life by hanging himself from the window grill of his room in Paposh Nagar.
When the teenager’s mother called out to her son and tried to enter the room, she found it locked. Not receiving an answer after knocking on the door, the woman called the neighbours, who broke the door down and saw the boy hanging from the window. Raza’s body was immediately taken to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, where doctors confirmed that the student had breathed his last. The family then decided to take the body away without completing legal formalities.
A local informed the police, who reached the hospital, along with the boy’s father. After negotiations the body was taken back to the medical facility for a postmortem.
SHO Paposh Nagar Rizwan told The News that when the teenager did not do well in his test, he asked his mother to sign the report card. However, she refused and said that his father would sign the report card when he returned home.
That is when things took a turn for the worse and the boy, unable to face his father, ended his own life. The SHO said that the mother’s refusal to sign the report card left the boy traumatised.However, others claimed the strict discipline of his school could have led to the suicide.
A professor of mass communication at FUUAST, Dr Taufeef Ahmed, said that one of the reasons that Raza committed suicide is because “the child probably came across an unkind or brutal teacher during his formative years.”
Director Teachers’ Resource Centre Abbas Hussain said the suicide was a “great pity. The loss of a young life is terrible, but it is much worse when a child takes his or her own life.”
He mentioned there were at least 260 ways of disciplining a child, and “none of them involved raising your hand”.
“When teachers, who ideally should be mature adults, take out their anger on young minds, there is no place in our society for a child to release his or her frustrations.”
As general practice, he added, teachers should be made to understand that “a 13-year old will only make mischief when he is that age, and not as an adult”.
Earlier on Tuesday, a class-VII student in Abbottabad committed suicide due to the fact that he was maltreated by his teachers. Before ending his life, the student, Abdul Mobin, expressed his frustration to his parents in the form of a letter. He complained about the hardships of hostel life and appealed to his parents to never send his sisters to a hostel.