Opinion
I’ve said it before, and sadly I have to say it again: when do we start spitting on teachers?
After all, the moral standing of priests has been indelibly besmirched by the shocking revelations that, not only were a minority of priests horrifically active paedophiles but that the entire Church establishment conspired to cover up their crimes. Worse, by covering up for and shuffling around priestly paedophiles, the Church authorities allowed the abuse to continue on a scale and a timeline that should never have been allowed.
Which brings us to government-run schools.
US researcher Carol Shakeshaft’s mind-boggling study into child abuse in public schools concluded that it was “likely 100 times worse than in churches”. Just like the churches, public education bureaucracy has conspired to cover up for and enable paedophiles in their ranks. But, unlike the churches, public schools have almost entirely escaped censure for what the churches are vilified for.
That’s the US — and it’s no better in Australia.
After six months examining decades of crimes against students in state-run schools, the government-initiated inquiry leading the investigation [into child sexual abuse in the Victorian Department of Education] delivered its findings to the Victorian governor.
The government has not said when it will make the report and its response public.
In other words, the cover-up continues. Not least by limiting the inquiry to just the tip of the iceberg.
Although the inquiry has uncovered shocking evidence during public hearings that the Victorian Education Department knowingly shuffled paedophile teachers around the state and endangered children, its scope was limited to a single cluster of four offenders who taught at Beaumaris Primary School in Melbourne’s bayside south-east.
Active civil claims and convictions suggest that more than 100 government schools may be affected.
Survivors, advocates and lawyers have claimed the inquiry was only ever going to scratch the surface of a statewide crisis that was at its worst between the 1960s and 1990s.
A government inquiry in Tasmania similarly concluded that a shocking number of past and present school and hospital staff were suspected or known paedophiles, yet the education department just kept shuffling them from school to school.
Even the carefully-selected focus on just one school hints at the horrific webs spun across the whole system.
In the early 70s, four prolific offenders overlapped at [Beaumaris Primary] school.
But in lengthy careers with the Victorian Education Department, those teachers were also shuffled elsewhere, teaching at a combined 24 Victorian government schools between the 50s and 90s.
Just as the churches are damned for, education bureaucrats knew and stymied all efforts to hold the creeps to justice. It didn’t help that the powerful football establishment was also implicated.
Despite the attempts of a survivor to have [former football star Grahame Steele] charged by police while he was still working in a school as a principal, his government school career spanned from 1952 to 1990 and he was never prosecuted before dying in 2013.
Evidence presented at the inquiry suggests Steele continued offending in the period after he was reported to police.
In November last year, the most infamous of the Beaumaris offenders, Darrell Ray, died while facing dozens of new charges […]
In the 60s and 70s, Ray rampantly abused boys at four state schools and in the St Kilda Football Club’s little league team, which he coached for 11 years.
In 1979 and 2001, Ray was convicted of a combined total of 33 offences against 21 boys.
But investigations and a civil lawsuit suggest that he likely abused many more.
Ray’s brother-in-law, Gary Mitchell, sexually abused boys at government schools for his entire 31-year teaching career and beyond — despite credible complaints by students and their parents in the early 70s.
Mitchell is also implicated in abuse at the St Kilda Little League team.
The fourth of Beaumaris Primary’s gang of paedophiles was David MacGregor. His story reveals just how far the Victorian Education Department went to protect and enable paedophiles in its ranks.
Even once MacGregor was convicted of child sex crimes, the Victorian Education Department not only kept him on as an employee but granted him further teaching positions.
It was only due to the intervention of headmasters and the teacher’s union that MacGregor was not returned to the classroom before his 1992 retirement.
As one investigator says, it was quite clear that the Department’s first priority was “where did MacGregor want to [go]”. Protecting children didn’t even enter into it.
But the tragedy at Beaumaris Primary was merely a microcosm of a statewide sexual abuse crisis in Victorian government schools.
Data collated by ABC Investigations from criminal and civil legal documents and via specialist abuse law firms indicates that sexual abuse of children took place in many more schools across the state.
ABC Australia
But, even now, the government’s inquiry is determined to keep most of the abuse under wraps. In at least one case, the Department consulted a psychologist who deemed the teacher “incapable of controlling his urges to sexually abuse children”. He was sent straight back to the classroom. Another teacher was notorious for “wandering around classrooms with an erection and rubbing his penis on boys”. Despite complaints from parents as early as 1966, and two criminal trials, he continued teaching for decades, in multiple schools.
Another abuser preyed on girls from his very first appointment in the early 70s. When one of his own colleagues complained, in 1981, she was offered a transfer. The paedophile teacher wasn’t barred from classrooms until he was jailed in 1991.
The churches have long been rightly held to account. Why are the schools still getting away with it?