3 Ctrip nursery employees detained by police
A man pushes a boy in stroller past Ctrip's nursery for its employees' children in Shanghai on November 9.
Three people at a nursery for Ctrip employees’ children in Shanghai were detained for alleged child abuse, Shanghai police said today.
Police said Ctrip, the Shanghai-based online travel agency, reported the suspected mistreatment of children at its day-care on Wednesday.
It put four people under control and now detained three of them, although none of their names have been announced yet.
Video clips from the facility’s surveillance cameras were spread online, sparking an outpouring of rage from the public.
One of the videos, filmed on November 1, seemed to show a woman throwing a girl’s backpack on the ground and pushing the toddler, who then falls down, hitting her head on the edge of a desk.
In another, from last Friday, a teacher appeared to forcefully feed something to some of the children who then begin to cry. Some parents said it was wasabi, a particularly strong form of mustard.
The Ctrip nursery was set up in February last year and run by an agency called School for the Children, owned by Modern Family magazine.
The magazine was wholly owned by Shanghai Women’s Federation, which issued a statement early Thursday.
The federation strongly condemned the incident, and said they will strictly punish Modern Family magazine and tighten up management over its subordinate companies to prevent such incidents from happening again.
The magazine was exposed as having no experience of operating day-care facilities at all before running Ctrip’s nursery, according to a report by Thepaper.cn.
“We are fully responsible for this severe matter which has exposed obvious loopholes and problems in our internal management,” part of the statement read.
The nursery, which catered for around 110 children aged between 18 months and 3 years, has been shut down as Ctrip seeks employees' opinions as to whether or not it should even reopen.
