Children sent to a corner, teacher risks conviction for ill-treatment

Aconviction formistreatment of ateacher who sent a child into a corner 'to calm down' is at risk. The Court of Cassation thus annulled, with referral, the sentence with which the Court of Appeal had acquitted anursery school teacher, of the offence under Article 572 of the Criminal Code. The judges of legitimacy, in fact, upheld the prosecution's appeal against a verdict considered too soft for the'old style' teacher. The same territorial judges had admitted that the methods used by the teacher were 'questionable'. In the Court of Appeal's opinion, however, the woman, born in 1961, should be acquitted because there was no proof that she was motivated 'by a willingness to harass children and subject them to particular punishments'. The choice was to confine the little ones to a corner, even accompanying them with some pushing until they calmed down.

A method very much in vogue in theblack-and-white school of the post-war period, which endured even in the baby boom years, when the fate of the most turbulent was to end up behind the blackboard. Today the system survives, endorsed even by some psychologists, and is called 'time out'. The Supreme Court, in upholding the prosecution's appeal, valorised the declarations of theparents, who had recounted the effects on their children of the repeated punishments, combined with shouting. The result was suffering that resulted ininsomnia, refusal to go to kindergarten and bouts of crying.

With regard to the absence of "malice" on the part of the teacher, which had led to her acquittal in second instance, the Supreme Court recalled that, in order to affirm the subjective element of the crime of ill-treatment, it is not necessary that the person acting does so in order to inflict physical or moral suffering without a plausible motive, but only generic malice is sufficient. And thus the consciousness and will to subject the passive subject to suffering on a continuous basis. On this point, the Court of Cassation warns, the Court of Appeal's sentence is not logical, because on the one hand it admits the defendant's overpowering and prevarication to the detriment of the minors, and on the other it excludes that, despite the actions that were "objectively distressing for the children", the teacher was aware that "she was persisting in an activity damaging to their physical and psychological integrity.