Dubai Police discovers child torture by housemaid on Instagram

Instagram has helped discover torture of an Emirati child by the family's housemaid, according to Dubai Police’s Human Rights and Public Administration Chief Brigadier General Dr. Mohammed Al Murr.

Dr Al Murr said after the police came to know of the child’s suffering through the social network site, it checked whether the allegation is true and then provided him protection.

Al Murr said that a woman had reported to police via Instagram that her maid had told her that her friend, also working as housemaid for an Emirati family, is torturing their child while his parents are out at work.

He added that a police team immediately contacted the woman on Instagram and got information about the family which lived in another Emirate.

Al Murr said the team called the family and made sure that the information they had received is true. They told them that they had fired the maid after they noticed that their child became sick after staying for a long time with the maid.

The mother, who had to travel a lot because her work, then quit the job to look after her son better.

The police also ended the suffering of the Emirati family’s four children who had dropped out of school during the current year due to the delay in payment of last year’s tuition fees.

A charity institution intervened and helped the family to get their children back to school, after their story was published in the Arabic language daily newspaper Emarat Alyoum.

Al Murr said, “The father reached an agreement with the school to settle the accumulated amount of Dh110,000 but he  couldn’t pay it immediately, so we contacted a charity which paid the sum. The children were able to go back to school after absence for a month,” he added.

Al Murr said: “There are four more families which are suffering from the same problem. In one case, two children aged 12 and 13, who could not to go to school because their father had left the country after disagreements with his wife, without renewing the boys’ passports or residence visa. The mother’s condition also had worsened after she lost her job.”

He added that the mother contacted the police to communicate with the embassy of the boys’ country, to help renew their passports, and for permission to stay with their mother who had got a job.

He pointed out that the Women and Children Protection Department had recorded 42 cases of suffering children in the first nine months of this year. He attributed most of the problems to the intransigence of one of the spouses, especially parents who punish children in retaliation against their mothers. Some of them take their children’s documents, preventing them from enrolling in school.

He explained that it is the mother who usually gets custody of her children in case of separation of parents. In many cases, the father, unwilling to look after the children, files false information about the wife by accusing her of negligence or poor care of children. He pointed out that the administration always tries to make sure that the information they get is true and tries to find a solution to help the family.

 

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