A teacher has been arrested by police in Zimbabwean for flogging two boys on their penises on suspicion they were being intimate with girls.
Deputy headmaster at Lower Gweru Mission school in Zimbabwe’s Midlands Province, 51-year-old Jabulani Sibanda was arrested Wednesday.
The boys aged 16 and 17 are reportedly on admission in a local hospital with the 16-year-old said to be in critical condition.
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Sources close to the arrest are quoted by The Herald as saying: “The privates of one of the boys got swollen after the beating, and he has been failing to pass urine.”
“Doctors had to put a tube to assist him. He is said to be in a serious condition.”
The 17-year-old was said to have dislocated his spinal cord as he tried to resist the beating.
“The boys are all in hospital and their parents have been notified by the school authorities,” said the sources.
A docket has reportedly been opened against the deputy headteacher.
Ban on caning
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s constitutional court banned the caning of juvenile convicts as a judicial punishment earlier this year.
A panel of nine judges decided that judicial corporal punishment was illegal under the country’s constitution, ruling it was cruel, inhuman punishment.
Caning as judicial punishment was permitted in Zimbabwe for males under the age of 18 under the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act and has been a common sentence.
However, the judges argued it contravened a section of the constitution adopted in 2013, which states that no person may be subjected to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.
The ruling came after a 15-year-old boy convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl challenged his sentence of three strokes of the cane.
