As I wrote some time ago, Is it time to spit on teachers? Not, of course, that I’m seriously advocating mass expectoration directed at the average chalkie. What I was highlighting was the extraordinary double-standard when it comes to institutional child abuse.
The churches have, quite rightly, been held up to unrelenting public opprobrium for their role in harbouring and covering up for serial paedophiles. Yet, teachers occupy a similar position of public trust as priests once did – and teachers are abusing kids, too. Probably more even than priests.
Despite the selective focus of the media and public almost entirely on clerical abuse, the facts are that priests are not much more likely than the general public to be child abusers. About 4% of Catholic priests in the US abused children from the 1950s to the 2000s. Yet, in the same time frame, 5-7% of public school teachers in the US were abusers.
Moreover, the incidence of priestly abuse peaked 50 years ago and has since slowed to a trickle (most of the cases which continue to dominate the news are historical). Teacher abuse, however, appears to be on the rise.
Not just rising – surging. “It’s an epidemic”, “a pandemic”, according to investigators.
And there’s no reason to delude ourselves that schools in Australia and New Zealand are somehow immune. The recently concluded case of Sydney teacher Chris Dawson exposed an horrific, serial paedophile ring operating in schools in that city.
And New Zealand?
The recent story of a teacher engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a student has again sparked concerns for school students around the country.
The Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal found a teacher, legally known as Taurapa but previously known as Connor Taurapa Matthews, to have engaged in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old student.
Just like the paedophile priests, Taurapa was shuffled through the system, even while his superiors knew of the allegations.
This story eventually made its way to the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal, but Taurapa still taught at two other schools after this event took place.
NZ Herald
And he wasn’t the only kiddy-fiddler at the same school.
A private girls’ school that employed a teacher who had an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old student, has had two other former teachers found to have committed “serious misconduct” towards young women.
NZ Herald
That’s just one school. While it’s possible, of course, that this one school is an outlier, would any parent want to take bets on it?
None of this is, of course, to suggest that all teachers are paedophiles — even though no one seems to have any problem levelling the same generalisation at priests — but it does show that the profession needs to come clean about the spiders lurking in its darker corners.
After all, we’ve seen the horrors that prevail when good institutions turn a blind eye to things they’d rather not know about.