If you are a mother trying to get the telephone number of your daughter’s school, you will not get it. The operator will tell you that it is strictly forbidden to give the numbers for girls’schools to anyone. Try the Department of Girls’ Education and you will get the same answer. The only way to get the number is to have connections in the department who know you and trust you. What a situation! If this is the case with a mother, what would it be like if the caller were a father? Not only that but female principals insist on using mail to send notes and other school correspondence to the parents. On rare occasions, they may call the student’s home but this only happens in an emergency.
The instructions are clear: No telephone number of any girls’ school is to be given to anyone, even if the caller is from the Department of Girls’ Education. Ask a mother what she endures each time she needs to call her daughter’s school. Time is wasted in getting the number no matter how urgent the matter is — emergency or not. These rules have been laid down with the intention of preventing males from harassing the schools. The problem would be easily solved by using caller ID. Even if improper behavior occurred, it could be dealt with by members of the Committee for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice.
Why all this secrecy? What is the real purpose of such a ban? Is it to protect students and their teachers from being targeted by men? Will refusing to give telephone numbers and applying all this secrecy a guarantee that nothing unseemly will happen? The ban on giving phone numbers means only one thing: neither students nor teachers can be trusted. By the way, this ban is only enforced concerning public schools. The telephone numbers of private schools are available everywhere; advertisements put up by the schools carry the full address, including of course the contact phone numbers.
When will we stop treating women like this? No walls, no matter how tall, are going to prevent a woman from doing what she wants to do. As the English saying goes, where there is a will, there is a way. There are many other ways of deterring improper behavior than by refusing to give out school phone numbers.
Published 12 July 2002
