Children are being bullied in school as coronavirus fear spreads

CHINESE leaders in Greater Manchester say children in schools across the region are being bullied about coronavirus.

Jenny Wong, director of Manchester Chinese Centre, says she has received scores of complaints about ‘racist’ incidents. She says parents have raised the issue during the centre’s legal and welfare drop-in sessions.

The 63-year-old has a long list, written in Mandarin, of incidents reported to staff at the centre in Ardwick.

“When the children go to school they are bullied by their classmates. The first case I heard was about a little girl in a primary school in north Manchester.

“Her best friend told her ‘my mum told me I’m not allowed to play with Chinese children anymore because you are the virus carrier’,” Jenny tells the M.E.N.

“At a school in Oldham, classmates said ‘keep away from the Chinese, they are all poisoned by the virus’”.

Parents have come to Jenny to ask for advice, and she has told them to raise the issue with their head teacher as a matter of urgency. She thinks teachers need to be re-educating the pupils that not all Chinese children carry the virus.

More than 28,000 cases of the virus, which was first reported in the Wuhan province of China, have been confirmed globally since the outbreak.

Of those, 563 have died. Just three cases have been confirmed in the UK.

But the spread of the virus has fuelled hostility towards the Chinese community living in Britain.

Does she believe these incidents amount to racism?

“Yes definitely. It leaves people feeling awful. There’s a panic.”

Jenny, who has been director of the centre since 2005, says there is also fear within the Chinese community that they will spread the virus among each other. Many people believe what is shared online about them, and so they isolate themselves from the community.

“For the Chinese parents, they panic as well. So they don’t want to visit their friends and relatives. They don’t even want to go outside.

“A lot of parents are panicking, they pass it down to their children.”