As I’ve written many times, the churches have been rightly excoriated for their deplorable decades of covering up at the least, or at worst actively enabling, the paedophiles in their ranks. No such well-earned comeuppance has ever been meted out to the education sector. That’s despite paedophilia and physical abuse in schools is at least as bad, if not exponentially worse, than in the churches.
And it’s still going on. Abusers in schools who prey on the most vulnerable of the vulnerable – disabled children – can rest easy that they’ve got the bureaucrats to run cover for them. Even to the point of siccing the police onto mothers who dare document the abuse dealt out to their children at school.
Take the mother in Gippsland, Victoria, whose seven-year-old son is non-verbal, autistic, epileptic and profoundly delayed. A month into his time at Churchill Primary School he began screaming in the car each morning, begging not to be left, refusing to be alone with anyone but his mother. There were bruises. She complained to the school, repeatedly, and got the standard reassurance that all was well.
So she did what the disability advocate advised and sewed a recorder into the boy’s clothes, then listened back each night until she heard an aide tell her son:
“You hurt me, I’ll hurt you.”
Her reward for that discovery? The school reported her and the police charged her. Under Victoria’s Surveillance Devices Act, the same statute that would have caught a villain bugging a boardroom, the law has been turned on a mother trying to find out why her voiceless child had come to dread school. As she put it:
“I was trying to protect my child.”
The officer’s mercy was a $300 donation to charity in exchange for a clean record. That’s not a joke.
Note what the recording achieved. The aide has written a formal apology in which she does not specifically recall the exchange but nonetheless takes full responsibility for the language used. Nobody disputes the words. Nobody denies the audio. And yet the machinery of the state found the time to investigate the mother, and none, evidently, to investigate the threat allegedly made to a disabled child in a classroom.
The aide, we are assured, is reflecting on her communication style under stress. The mother is the one facing court.
Now widen the lens to Latrobe Special Development School in Traralgon, where the parents’ group Voices for Special Needs has asked the premier for a review into alleged abuse, physical, mental and sexual, inflicted on some 60 students over nearly two decades. The allegations include 15 claimed incidents of sexual abuse: student-on-student, and by staff against students. The group has handed the premier and every state MP a timeline of alleged assaults stretching from 2008 to 2026 and wants cameras in special-school classrooms and on the buses that ferry these children to and from school. The group’s Leanne Vella cannot see why that is not simply a given.
“For the life of me, I can’t see why it’s not just a given.”
She is right and the reason is not cost: it is culture.
A former education support worker, Anne, spent two decades at Latrobe and says she was left scarred by what she witnessed, diagnosed with PTSD and depression after reporting it. Staff, she alleges, could be physically and verbally abusive: students dragged around, shoved to the ground, one referred to as a “dirty little prick”. Those who complained, she says, were bullied and frozen out. When she raised it:
“You couldn’t speak to them about what happened with the kids because they wouldn’t listen.”
The department’s answer, when she reported manhandling and sexual abuse in 2022, was to tell her to go on WorkCover.
There was a culture review in 2021, yielding 10 recommendations, then a plan of 34 actions, most ticked off by late 2022. The department says it knows of no fresh misconduct claims since. It also declines to release the review, citing confidentiality. The premier calls the allegations harrowing.
“We will respond. It is with authorities.”
Spoken just like a bishop in the ’70s when told there’s a rockspider in the rectory.
This is precisely the problem. The authorities respond to the mother with a summons. The school’s culture responds to the children with silence.
The churches were made to answer in the end, because the victims and their families kept shouting. Here the victims cannot speak at all. That is not a reason to look away: it is the reason to look hardest.
