banned from the school bus because she pulled a seven-year-old boy’s pants down after he repeatedly told her to take off her headscarf.
The girl lives in a remote part of the Australia, called the Northern Territory, south of Darwin.
The bus company Buslink sent a letter to Middle Point School at Fogg Dam stating that first grade student Iran Ghavami was banned for 10 days for “bullying and harassment of other passengers.”
Her Muslim father, Karim Ghavami, and non-Muslim mother, Lorraine Gerassim-opoulos, were horrified when they pulled the letter out of their eldest daughter’s school bag.
“She is only six years old—it is a bit harsh,’’ said the mother.
“We would have preferred a warning so we could have sat down and talked about this incident, but they are stopping her from going to school.’’
Buslink transport services manager Aaron Blasch defended the ban, saying the company was only following the Northern Territory’s code of conduct for school bus travel.
Blasch said because the girl was only six they reduced the ban from 10 to five days.
A Department of Education official, Vicki Baylis, said Buslink had a right to ban the girl. “As the Buslink letter advises, there is a code of conduct for school bus travel and the company’s decision was based on that code,’’ she said.
The ban means Iran has to stay home this week because her parents cannot make the 60 kilometers round trip to school from their home in Marrakai, which is far down the highway from such curiously named communities as Humpty Doo and Wak Wak.
Ghavami, an Iranian immigrant, works nights as a taxi driver and the family has only one car.
Blasch would not say if the boy had also been banned for harassing the younger girl.
Iran said the boy, who goes to the same school, tormented her often. She said his teasing on the bus “made me sad and angry at the same time,” prompting her to take revenge.
“She knows next time she needs to tell us, the principal or teacher at the school,’’ said the mother.
Pulling someone’s trousers down is a uniquely Australian form of retaliation. It even has it own word: dacking.