Children of asylum seekers in the Northern Netherlands were exposed to crude images during their language lessons in the past few weeks.
Translation by Traci White
During a Power Point presentation about toys, the children were shown an image of a Barbie doll wearing a bomb belt. Another slide explaining Dutch traffic signs featured sexually explicit texts written in Dutch.
Dagblad van het Noorden reports that students at the Expertisecentrum Anderstaligen in Emmen were exposed to the images, and it is not yet clear if students at other schools saw them or not.
Maja Zuiderveld, the location manager, says that she thinks the images were somehow snuck into the presentation by someone with a sick sense of humour. Zuiderveld says that she does not think that the organisation that makes the presentations, CED-groep, is behind the offensive images.
According to an instructor at the school who asked to remain anonymous, older children in particular were upset by the images. Many of the kids in the programme have fled from war zones in Syria and Eritrea.
Jos van Kessel, the director of CED-groep, says that the organisation is taking the incident very seriously. “We would never, ever grant permission for these kinds of images to be used in our lessons, and we fully distance ourselves from this kind of conduct.”
