Riyadh: Rising numbers of rape and sexual harassment cases against young schoolgirls have alarmed parents in Saudi Arabia.
Questions are now being raised about government’s inability to filter people with criminal background from entering into the Kingdom and take employment as bus drivers.
In a recent case, a school bus driver molested an 8-year girl in Jeddah on three different occasions while driving her from home to school and back. It is very surprising that the parents couldn’t guess the pain their daughter was undergoing. It was the female school principal who found out the girl’s sad plight by reading her face and informed the police about the crime.
It was revealed during the investigation that the driver who molested the Jeddah girl had a criminal history. If that is true who allowed him to re-enter the Kingdom, even after he was fingerprinted. If he was appointed as a school bus driver, why did not they check his background, asks a mother in an article published on Saudi Gazette.
“How was this criminal able to rape a little girl on three occasion by taking her to makeshift house in a crowded neighborhood without the knowledge of her family, or anyone else for that matter? Parents used to ask school authorities when their children did not return home on time. How can a girl arrive late three times without her mother asking for the reason? We should commend the female school principal who found out the girl’s sad plight by reading her face and informed the police about the crime,” the mother said.
“This is not an isolated incident. Such crimes are increasing day by day. People like me cannot forget the incident in which a 50-year-old school driver raped a 5-year-old girl near her nursery school in Riyadh.
“Another driver of a school bus, who was an illegal resident, had assaulted an 8-year-old girl also in Riyadh and threatened her that he would kill her if she had disclosed the incident to anyone.
The biggest tragedy is that the Education Ministry did not do anything to prevent such incidents. Subsequently, sexual abuse of girl students is recurring. In my opinion, the ministry has a big responsibility in preventing such incidents, not by just appointing elderly drivers but by taking other precautionary measures such as installing cameras inside school buses and appointing a woman guard to look after girls in every bus. If we ignore such little things, we will end up facing big tragedies.
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