Ray

Abuse so systematic a 3 year old boy is sure being slapped is how he should be put to sleep. A mother in Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, has just discovered something about her little boy. He has been attending the same daycare for three years. He apparently thinks that getting slapped is part of being put to sleep. He doesn't know it's wrong. Why would he? He has been learning about the world from the very people who were supposed to protect him. Three women working at the daycare, including its director, have been arrested. Police investigators examining security footage suspect one employee of 187 separate incidents of abuse, another of 77, and the director herself of 18. Children allegedly slapped, shaken, thrown around, tied up, their mouths and noses covered. In one single day investigators identified 36 suspected incidents of violence. One day. Imagine what it must be like to be so small that you cannot defend yourself, cannot explain what is happening to you, and have absolutely no way of understanding why the grown-ups are hurting you. The daycare was called Luchi. Rays of Light. Parents entrusted their children to these women every morning. Some of them for years. They are now discovering that things they had accepted as ordinary childhood accidents may have been something else entirely. And I keep thinking about that little boy who apparently believes a slap is how you put someone to sleep. How do you begin to teach a child that what he has always known as normal was actually cruelty? How do you explain tenderness to someone who learned to expect pain from the hands that held him? The women are suspects, not convicted criminals. But the evidence described by investigators is horrifying enough. And whatever happens in court, those children will need something much harder to obtain than a conviction: the chance to discover that the world is not necessarily the place they were taught it was.