Schoolgirls ordered into murky fish pond over sanitary towel

Two hundred schoolgirls of a Malaysian boarding school were forced to squat, neck-deep, in a murky pond after a used sanitary pad was found in a toilet bowl.

The girls were in the pond for an hour during heavy rain while the warden, who meted out the punishment, stood under an umbrella to supervise the punishment.

The punishment, which was described as "improper", is being investigated by the Education Ministry.



The female teacher who had forced nearly 200 girls into a fish pond said she had meted out the punishment as the school's toilet bowls were repeatedly clogged by sanitary pads dumped into them.

Wee Yim Pien, the warden of SMK Bawang Assan, claimed that school prefects had to use their bare hands to pull the sanitary pads out of the toilet bowls whenever there was a blockage.



She said that some of the boarders had repeatedly in the past three years ignored her instructions to dump the sanitary pads into the dustbins provided outside the toilets.

“We also provide old newspapers for them to wrap the pads before disposal,” the warden told reporters.

She intended to keep the 170 girls in the pond for five minutes but extended it to 30 minutes because they were “very chatty”.