CAIRO - Egypt's Ministry of Education will employ security guards from private companies to help maintain order and security inside schools nationwide after incidents of violence, physical and sexual harassment that has recently grabbed the nation. "The ministry decided to establish a public affairs unit that will comprise two persons each. One of them will be a teacher who will deal with parents of children and solves problems as the other will be a security guard to maintain order," a Ministry of Education source said Sunday. He added that a central unit was established to help monitor any kind of violence inside schools. "The new units will take any necessary decisions to achieve discipline," the source said. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif affirmed in press remarks last week that the Government was determined to curb violence in schools. In recent weeks, violent incidents left many students, teachers and parents injured, making headlines in the local press. The most shocking incident was exposed when a father filed a complaint with prosecutors claiming that his son was raped by three students at a school in Heliopolis in Cairo. The incident prompted the education minister to go to the school himself in order to investigate the incident. There has been an increase in media coverage of similar incidents following the rape of the schoolchild. The local press has also reported that a teacher in Giza raped a student for four consecutive days before the boy reported the incident to the police. According to statistics published last year by the UNICEF, 50 per cent of children in Upper Egypt and 70 per cent in urban areas report corporal punishment in schools. Around 50 per cent of pupils say they have been threatened with either low grades or expulsion. A rash of teacher-on-student violence has blighted Egypt's schools over the past year, as Minister of Education Ahmed Zaki Badr once told the Shura Council (the Upper House of teh Egyptian Parliament) that preventing school teachers from beating students as a form of punishment would leave teachers vulnerable to attack Badr then condemned incidents of teacher-student violence that took place recently, which he described as "very strange". He stressed that he is against violence and will work to eradicate this phenomenon.
