Teacher Aquitted After Forcing a Child to Write "I Am Retarded" One-Hundred Times

According to Reuters, an Italian teacher was in hot water with the legal system after forcing a student to pencil "I am a retard" 100 times.

She was acquitted.

The identity of the teacher has been withheld for privacy reasons. However, this female teacher forced the 12-year-old boy to write the sentences after the student stood in the way of a fellow pupil, blocking the pupil's way of the toilet, while calling him "girly" and "gay".

The student's parents requested 25,000 euros, or $33,580, in damages. A public prosecutor requested a 2-month stay in prison for the teacher. Regardless, a court source said the court cleared the teacher. In fact, gay rights groups wanted the charges of abuse to be dropped.

The teacher feels her punishment for the boy had been nothing but appropriate, mostly because of a highly publicized case of a young suicide of an Italian student who had been taunted in school because of his homosexuality.

The teacher said, "I never intended to humiliate the boy," after being cleared, to a group of journalists.

In Italian, the words, "Io sono deficiente", which were the the words the teacher forced the student to write, translate into "I am deficient". However, the word "deficient" is commonly used a derogatory term meaning "mentally retarded" or "moron".

The teacher said, "I explained, discussing with him and his classmates, that deficient means 'lacking'. He was 'lacking' sensitivity for one of his classmates."

According to Pravada, in 2005 a 14-year-old student in Russia went to a train station and committed suicide by laying his head on the tracks when he was sure a train was coming. In the boy's pocket was a note stating the his teacher is responsible for his suicide. The teacher harassed him and ostracized him by forcing him to clean floors, after being unable to bring in an equivalent of $10 USD to the teacher in an effort to make classroom repairs.

Although the case of harassment in Italy was not as extreme, the harassment was put to an end before anything extreme could take form.