Chinese schoolgirl, 7, recovers after boys force scraps of paper into her eyes
- Specialists consulted by girl’s family say they ‘had never dealt with such cases’
- School principal says there was no malice and the three boys were just ‘playing’
Doctors who plucked dozens of scraps of paper from the eyes of a seven-year-old bullying victim said they had never seen a case like it, mainland media reported on Monday.
The girl, from Yuzhou in central Henan province, complained of poor vision at the end of September, a day after three boys stopped her on her way to class and forced scraps of paper from a notepad into her eyes, according to Henan Television’s City Channel.
The child’s mother, surnamed Li, said that in four weeks doctors at several hospitals took most of the scraps out but none was prepared to say if all of the pieces were gone, according to the report.
The specialists consulted by the girl’s family said they “had never dealt with such cases” in their decades of experience.
The girl said she was accosted by the boys as she went to class after lunch one day. “They opened her eyes wide … crumpled a few scraps at a time and squeezed them in,” her mother said.
The school principal, a man surnamed Wang, said that no one could recall how many pieces were put in her eyes.
“There was no teacher there at that moment, and no one could tell how many,” he said. “According to the one who put them in, it was a corner of a sheet of paper from an exercise book.”
Chinese province Guangdong clamps down on school bullies with tougher penalties
Wang said the boys were just “playing”. “Children at this age, seven or eight, they bore no ill will,” he said.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Yuzhou government said specialists in Beijing concluded on October 25 that there was no piece of paper left in the girl’s eyes and she was safe to go home.
It said Wang and the head teacher of the girl’s class were ordered to write a self-criticism, a Communist Party disciplinary action.
The families involved had signed an agreement on compensation and the boys’ guardians were warned to better instruct the children about safety, it said.
