Abusive Teachers: How do we deal?

One may find it sad to hear of sexual abuse by teachers of the children they’re tasked with caring for.

One may even feel that there is an increase in the number of these stories and be led to believe that abuse cases are on the rise. Perhaps it is the case, or perhaps there is simply more support and mechanisms for kids to come forward.

Whatever the reason, more truth is coming out, and it can be attributed to a discarding of the code of silence.

The code of silence has always been a bit of an enigma. Keeping knowledge of abuse under wraps, especially historically, can have its place. If you’re trying to protect a kid, having the whole school aware that their teacher did something to them might be devastating to the kid.

Imagine that scenario a couple of years ago, when trauma counselling for this kind of thing was in its infancy, and the stigma of abuse weighed heavily on the abused. It was a different time.

Unfortunately, that “code of silence” became abused itself and was used not to protect children but rather to protect the school’s image.

But no school I’m aware of has ever been shut down by an abuse scandal.

Those scandals eventually came out, and yet any school associated with them remains open. Not only that.

We now know that it’s not just one or two schools where predators make their lairs. We also know that it’s not just the art of water polo that attracts predators. Predators can be incredibly likeable, friendly and qualified people; people who have colleagues who vouch for them in ignorance.

Changing perspective

Knowing all this, surely we can admit to ourselves that no school is immune to having a predator among its ranks.

Admitting that is powerful because it disarms us of the ability to point fingers at certain schools and categorise them as bad.

Why is that important? Imagine a world where there is a naughty teacher and the school associated with them has no incentive to hide anything because it won’t impact the school’s brand.

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Imagine, instead of a sensational headline taking advantage of the knowledge of a predator in a school, we’re given an encouraging headline praising the school for how it addressed the matter.

If we change the narrative and accept that we have predators in our society, they can slip into any educational environment and that ridiculing the schools that let them in has not helped keeping them out, perhaps we can really start to deal with this serious matter out in the open, where predators tend to not enjoy.

It’s very beneficial to the predators when schools want to keep these kinds of things quiet because they thrive in the shadows.

As a community, we’ve pushed schools to really care about their image, and yet, in all of this, we’ve created a perfect environment for predators to operate in.

Schools will continue to care about their brand as long as parents continue to care about the brand of the school their child attends.

That’s fine. That’s normal. We can’t change that entirely. What we can do is change how having a predator in a school affects the brand.

If we can accept the truth that predators can hide in plain sight, then we can start asking the right questions; what does a school do to monitor engagement between children and staff? What does the school do in response to an accusation? What relationship does the school have with the local child protection units?

If we can change the narrative to protecting children from dangerous people and making it easier for children to come forward, we can treat abuse with the seriousness it deserves, not weaponising it to ridicule the school down the road.

Since chances are, yours will be the school down the road not long from now.

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