News of child abuse are hard to take, as victims are always young and vulnerable kids who have been entrusted in the care of adults.

Surveillance footage of the abuse of toddlers at a Shanghai daycare facilities of Chinese travel giant Ctrip has surfaced on Chinese social media, triggering widespread anger among Chinese parents and netizens.

The video of the incidents posted by Beijing News on Sina Weibo has since garnered more than 45 million views and shared more than 33,000 times on microblogging platform Weibo, triggering some 42,000 comments.

Caught on camera

The footage spanned a few days from Nov. 1 to 3. Some of the shocking scenes include a staff member forcefully taking a backpack off a toddler and throwing it away from her.

She then pulled the girl’s hair, causing the girl to totter away unsteadily before hitting the table nearby and falling onto the ground. The other two staff members present were standing aside calmly and did nothing to stop the incident.

Another scene also showed another staff member walking towards a toddler who was standing, pinching his ear and putting him back onto his seat.

If what was seen earlier wasn't appalling enough, another scene showed a staff member, presumably the same person from the first incident, forcefully feeding the toddlers something from a tube – which was later confirmed to be wasabi – leaving them gasping and crying.

Some other alleged abusive practices and its consequences include spraying disinfectant directly onto the toddlers’ eyes and mouth and excessive diarrhea (6 times in an hour), with abnormally high levels of white blood cells in the faeces.

Many children had to be hospitalised a few days after entering the daycare.

Staff defensive and ambiguous when queried

Various screenshots of WeChat conversations with the childcare centre's employees show that parents already had concerns before the abuse was exposed, asking staff about bruises on their child and if something had happened at the centre.

The staff' when queried were ambiguous, even defensive, claiming that there were no problems in their management of the centre.

On Nov 3, Ctrips’s HR department received reports about alleged abuse from concerned staff at the daycare. The abuse was then exposed on Nov 6 when surveillance footage was inspected by company staff.

Public apology

The teacher in question apologised on Nov. 8 in an 'apology meeting' in front of enraged parents. While crying and kneeling down, she said, “I know that I’m wrong, and that whatever I say right now is meaningless.”

However, it wasn’t enough to quell the anger of the parents. Many of them weeped and screamed. One of them even brought along a tube of wasabi and forced it into her mouth.

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Outrage online

The incident has since gone viral on Chinese social media, and netizens have expressed their outrage.

Translation: She’s apologising not because she knows that she’s wrong, but because she is aware that she’s so unlucky to be caught.

Translation: Is she not afraid of karma? Even if it's not my own child, I'm still pained from watching the mothers cry, much less the parents and loved ones of these abused kids! Force-feeding them wasabi, sleeping pills, disinfectant, are these all done by humans? They are animals!

Translation: Shanghai parents are really tolerant. Parents from the Dongbei like us, we’d have come with metal rods.

Childcare centre closed indefinitely

According to Sixth Tone, the daycare centre was established to serve the company’s more than 10,000 employees, as many had difficulties balancing work and child care, and that there was even a long waiting list. Shanghai has a drastic shortage of child care services.

In a statement released on Nov. 8, the headmaster, a teacher, a carer, as well as a cleaner, have been fired.  Three staff members whose identities are not released yet are currently being investigated by the police.

Global Times reported that Ctrip has apologized and promised to “offer physical examinations and psychological counseling to children in the daycare centre and parents, in an effort to minimize the impact of the incident".

The centre is currently closed indefinitely.

Other child abuse incidents

This incident is reminiscent of previous child abuse cases in China.

Last year, a case of child abuse in Zhejiang province saw two teachers detained for 12 and 14 days respectively, after a parent confirmed their suspicions of misconduct by concealing an audio-recording device in their child's bag.

In August this year, an essay by a primary school student that exposed daily abuse by a teacher also went viral on Weibo.

You can watch the surveillance video, as well as the staff member's public apology, here in this video:

[video width="640" height="360" mp4="https://static.mothership.sg/1/2017/11/The-accused-teacher-of-Ctrip-kindergarten-child-abuse-case-kneeling-in-apology.mp4"][/video]

Top image via Weibo.