NEW YORK, JUNE 2 (UPI) — A New York City woman has filed a lawsuit against the Education Department after her son was attacked by his classmates and forced to perform oral sex.
The mother, whose name was withheld, said her 8-year-old son was attacked by three male classmates at his elementary school in Harlem in March 2012, forced into a bathroom and made to perform oral sex, the New York Daily News reported.
“When I was going on line three kids drag me to the bathroom and they pull down there [sic] pants,” the lawsuit says he wrote in a statement to the school. “I told them no but they didn’t listen to me.”
The alleged ringleader of the attack — a fifth grader — had been involved in an attack on a female student two years prior, the newspaper said.
The recent victim’s mother said she filed a $6 million lawsuit Friday against the city Education Department in Manhattan Supreme Court for “emotional and psychological anguish.” She also alleged that the school failed to alert parents and authorities that the instigator of the attack had a history as a “sexual deviant.”
As per school and Education Department regulations, the ringleader, who has since left the school, received a 10-day suspension and the two other attackers, both third graders, were given five-day suspensions for “inappropriate or unwanted physical contact or touching someone in a private part of body.”
For the attack on the girl, former Principal Charyn Koppelson didn’t punish the ringleader, the girl’s mother said.
“She said, ‘He’s just a kid,'” the girl’s mother told the Daily News in March. “[The incidents] were never placed in the system at all.”
The male victim’s mother said she was the one who called police and that the attackers were allowed to leave school property before police arrived.
Department of Education rules mandate that police be called if a criminal incident happens on campus and poses an “immediate safety concern.”
An Education Department spokesman said he couldn’t comment on the lawsuit.
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