

The boy shows his hands and back covered in scars.



A local court in Nanjing ruled that the foster mother who beat her son after he failed to complete his homework had gone “too far,” upholding her six-month prison term.

The case broke in April after images spread around the internet of a boy, allegedly from Nanjing city, with several red-raw marks across his back suggestive of an intense whipping.

The weibo user who posted the original photos wrote: “At the age of six, the boy was legally adopted by his foster parents in Nanjing. The abusive conduct was found out by the boy’s teachers last year, but at the time the teachers thought it might have been an accident, so it didn’t get publicized.”

The boy was the third child of a rural family in Anhui Province, according to local media. He had been adopted by his aunt in the hope that he could receive a better education in the city.



Xinhua reports that police in Nanjing detained the mother, surnamed Li, who confessed to beating her 9-year-old son with a back scratcher and skipping rope for not doing his homework and telling lies.

Li was handed a prison term in September following a medical report which stated that the boy had suffered “minor injury.” She appealed the decision.

“I’m not a bad mother. I was just trying to discipline my child,” Li said at the trial. She apologized for her misbehavior and pleaded not guilty.

Strangely his biological parents had pleaded with prosecutors to show Li leniency, arguing that she loved the boy but had dealt with this issue in an overzealous fashion. During yesterday’s trial, Li’s lawyer showed a video made by the boy in which he asked for Li to return home.

The prosecutors defended the sentence, saying no matter how much Li might have loved her son, she had inflicted injury on the child. The boy’s biological mother said the boy was temporarily back in her custody, but she was worried about the “poor conditions” back in their rural home, and the child’s future.

Earlier this year, a tiger mom from Guangdong drew harsh criticism from netizens after forcing her child to kneel naked in the street and beg for money as punishment for hurting a fellow classmate in a fight.

[Images via Weibo // Xinhua]