Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

WOMEN

Teacher fined for pointing out cleavage with pencil

A German teacher who warned one of her teenage students about her provocative clothing has been fined for sticking a pencil down the girl's cleavage to make her point.

Published: 25 August 2012 16:11 CEST
Teacher fined for pointing out cleavage with pencil
Drawing attention. Photo: DPA

She agreed to pay a €400 fine to the Wiesbaden district court in Wiesbaden in return for the prosecutor’s office dropping charges of causing personal offence, a spokesman said.

The teacher had wanted to draw attention to how inappropriate the student’s clothing was for school, he said.

The 15-year-old girl’s clothing had become such a distraction for boys during class meetings, that she had been told to dress more moderately, the Wiesbadener Kurier newspaper reported.

But she refused to change her clothes – and her mother backed her up when school officials approached her.

After the pencil incident, the girl tried to start a campaign on the internet for the teacher to be made to leave the school banned from working as a teacher, the paper said.

“I will finish her,” the girl was reported to have posted. As a result, the student herself was also judged to have crossed the line. She was made to do 10 hours work community work and has been moved to another class.

The state education office is still examining whether the teacher’s behaviour should have further consequences.

DPA/rc

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

DISCRIMINATION

Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

Parents with Arabic-sounding names get a less friendly response and less help when choosing schools in Sweden, according to a new study from the University of Uppsala.

Published: 6 April 2022 12:05 CEST
Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

In one of the largest discrimination experiments ever carried out in the country, 3,430 primary schools were contacted via email by a false parent who wanted to know more about the school. The parent left information about their name and profession.

In the email, the false parent stated that they were interested in placing their child at the school, and questions were asked about the school’s profile, queue length, and how the application process worked. The parent was either low-educated (nursing assistant) or highly educated (dentist). Some parents gave Swedish names and others gave “Arabic-sounding” names.

The report’s author, Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh said that the study had demonstrated “relatively large and statistically significant negative effects” for the fictional Arabic parents. 

“Our results show that responses to emails signed with Arabic names from school principals are less friendly, are less likely to indicate that there are open slots, and are less likely to contain positive information about the school,” he told The Local. 

READ ALSO: Men with foreign names face job discrimination in Sweden: study

The email responses received by the fictional Arabic parents were rated five percent less friendly than those received by the fictional Swedish parents, schools were 3.2 percentage points less likely to tell Arabic parents that there were open slots at the school, and were 3.9 percentage points less likely to include positive information about the municipality or the school. 

There was no statistically significant difference in the response rate and number of questions answered by schools to Swedish or Arabic-sounding parents. 

Taghizadeh said that there was more discrimination against those with a low social-economic status job than against those with an Arabic name, with the worst affected group being those who combined the two. 

“For socioeconomic discrimination, the results are similar, however, here the discrimination effects are somewhat larger,” he told The Local. 

Having a high economic status profession tended to cancel out the negative effects of having an Arabic name. 

“The discrimination effects are substantially important, as they could potentially indirectly influence parents’ school choice decision,” Taghizadeh said.

“Investigating socioeconomic discrimination is also important in itself, as discrimination is seldom studied and as explicit discrimination legislation that bans class-based discrimination is rare in Western countries including Sweden, in contrast to laws against ethnic discrimination.” 

SHOW COMMENTS