A teacher guilty of hitting young children at the daycare where she worked has failed in her attempt to avoid a criminal record and was instead sentenced to house arrest and community service.
• Also read: Guilty of assault, educator says, kids beaten for love
• Also read: Teacher guilty of hitting toddler
“The many victims, the consequences [pour les parents] and ensure the importance of CPEs in the daily lives of a large majority [qu’une absolution] would harm the public interest,” Judge Alexandre St-Onge commented at the Montreal Courthouse this morning.
Nassira El Hmaini, 31, sitting in the courtroom, remained unmoved by the verdict, which will likely prevent her from finding a job that would involve contact with children.
It is that the defendant, who became a mother during the trial, swears she has evolved since she committed her crimes in the fall of 2020. At the time, she was working as an educator at a daycare center in the Villeray neighborhood of Montreal. . .
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Face slapping “out of love”
Angered by what she called “child kings,” whom she found “intolerable,” the woman hit four within a week. The toddlers were about 3 years old.
“The assault consists of slaps, head slaps, arm and hair pulling, and arm and leg grabs,” the judge said.
El Hmaini committed her crimes in the blind spot of daycare surveillance cameras, but a colleague secretly filmed her. The tutor has since been fired.
“The parents [d’une des victimes] scarred by what they experienced with their son, it had serious repercussions on the mother’s health,” the judge explained, recalling that other parents had experienced grief and a sense of betrayal.
For her part, the defendant had sworn that she never wanted to hurt the victims, that her actions were committed “out of love”.
Confused by that term, however, the judge concluded, in the face of reports, that the woman had hit the children to “gain control of a group of young children in a difficult and psychologically taxing work environment”.
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rehabilitation
But even if the risk of recidivism is low, Judge El Hmaini did not want to grant absolution from the defense, as requested by Me Maria Soledad Vivas Rodriguez.
Nor did he want to impose a 10-month sentence, as requested by the Crown, to reduce the risk of expulsion from the country and to help with the already well-advanced rehabilitation.
El Hmaini was eventually sentenced to almost six months of house arrest. She will therefore always be tied to her home with a few exceptions, for example for medical reasons. In addition, she must do 240 hours of community service as part of a two-year probationary period.
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