When are education bureaucrats going to be held to account, like churches? Are the media going to start smearing all teachers as paedophiles?
The Christian churches, Catholic especially, have been excoriated, legally and in the public eye, for their decades of failure to act when they knew a small number in their ranks were abusing children. Even worse, the churches covered up for the abusers and punished their victims.
An organisation whose “predominant response to child sexual abuse complaints has for decades been to ignore [victims], shield abusers and protect itself from legal, financial and reputational risks”. They’re talking about the Catholic church, right?
Wrong. This is the finding of an independent inquiry into sexual abuse in Tasmanian government schools.
The full report was handed to the government in June, but not been made public due to legal impediments.
The professors said that across the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the department’s primary responses to allegations “routinely involved deflecting or ignoring concerns and complaints, often by disbelieving or blaming students, and by shielding alleged or known sexual abusers.”
“We have found it deeply disturbing that, as concerns, complaints and ineffectual responses literally piled up in DoE’s records, serial abusers like Harington and LeClerc were not just allowed to keep teaching for decades, but that DoE leaders and others so wilfully disregarded the obvious risks and harms to students,” the professors said.
Just as certain Catholic diocese did, the Department of Education knowingly moved paedophile teachers around high schools, effectively allowing them to offend at will.
“We cannot explain this by assuming that ‘that’s just the way things were back then’, because the evidence in DoE’s own records shows that DoE officials very often acted in ways that were completely at odds with community expectations at the time,” the report’s findings say.
These aren’t some decades-old aberrations, either. The report found “residual cultural problems” and “very recent” examples.
The Department covered up these crimes so well, that the professors were unable to determine whether or not the incidence of sexual abuse in schools has declined, increased, or remained the same for the past 50-60 years.
All in all, this is practically identical to the abysmal responses of churches in decades past to clerical abuse.
Tasmania’s Education Department has apologised to victims and survivors of abuse in schools, and said it was fully committed to making schools safe.
ABC Australia
Yet, it hasn’t been held publicly to account, in the same way that churches have. While the Churches are routinely vilified by the media, schools are lionised.
It’s purely churlish of me, I’m sure, to suspect that that’s because teachers are almost uniformly left-wing, and not conservative fuddy-duddies like the Catholics. Or that teacher’s unions are massive supporters of left-wing parties.
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