Sunday Star Times
April 8 2001

Playing it safe
by Sarah Catherall

Two former teachers convicted last week of sexually molesting their pupils has reignited the debate about how to keep children safe in school.

The seven-year-old boy had been distressed all week at school. When he finally got into the principal's office, he broke down and wept.

The principal wanted nothing more than to put his arm around the child and reassure him.

But he didn't--because he felt he couldn't.

John Langley, who now heads the Teacher Registration Board, recalls the dilemma he felt as the principal of South Brighton School in Christchurch.

"My natural reaction would have been to put my arm around him, the normal thing you would expect someone to do in that situation . . . (but) I would have been making myself vulnerable and I think every male teacher feels vulnerable," he says.

This is the man who wipes sex molesters off the teaching register for abusing and assaulting children.

Since 1989, the board has deregistered 199 teachers, of whom 161 have been male (80%), primarily for sexual offences and assaults.

Langley is talking as the profession is rocked yet again by reports of teachers sexually abusing pupils in their care.

Kaperiere Petera Leef, 45, formerly of Hato Petera College in Auckland and HIV-positive, admitted five charges of indecent assault involving five boys, while Derek Humphreys, formerly of Palmerston North, has admitted 14 charges of abusing boys he took away on overnight camps.

Langley and his board are currently considering an application from Hato Petera to have Leef deregistered.

Such cases are tragic for the profession, says Langley, a father of two.

But he also constantly hears how the few bad apples are giving teachers, particularly men, a bad image, making parents paranoid and forcing teachers to constantly look over their shoulders. He fears that teachers'

relationships with children are becoming sanitised.

"The appalling behaviour of some has had a flow-on effect. It's creating a clinical environment in the classroom. There are young children who would expect a pat on the back when they have done something right, those normal reactions between teacher and child, but those things have had to be removed from the relationship because teachers feel so vulnerable."

Langley is handling cases where children have gone home and told their parents that a teacher--usually a male--put an arm around their shoulder or had another form of physical contact. "We sometimes deal with situations where it is very hard to tell where professional boundaries have been crossed or where someone has been demonstrating a normal human reaction which has been misconstrued . . . I'm aware of cases where relatively innocent things have happened and teachers have been put through the mill.

"What I think is now happening is that often teachers are so fearful, that principals are saying `don't touch at all'."

The stories he is hearing are backed up in a book published this week, Touchy Subject, which includes new research on the controversial topic.

According to the editor, associate professor Alison Jones, of Auckland University's education department, we are so anxious about teachers touching young children that the few men now going into teaching are being trained to keep their hands in their pockets and push children away when they come close.

Male teachers are being told that to protect themselves and be "good" teachers, they should not touch young children.

"The teacher must learn that the pleasures to be had in cuddling children, or letting them hold his hand or lean against him or sit on his knee, or grab around his legs, or ride on his back, or tackle him during a ball game are improper experiences," she writes.

The trainees she interviewed said they also taught kids the boundaries about touching. "When they kind of grab me, I try and tell them gently that that's not the way we do it here. I don't want to hurt their feelings but they have to learn," one said.

Another said: "I have come to not even like a kid coming at me now. I'm sort of on the alert."

Despite last week's abuse cases, Jones, a mother of two boys, argues that abuse in schools and early childhood centres is rare. Although no hard data is available, she argues that a preschooler is more likely to be "stung by a bee and have an allergic reaction to it or be hit by a bus on the way to creche" than be abused by a teacher.

She says horrific abuse is not a new phenomenon. To understand our reaction to it, we must consider the climate of anxiety sweeping through society. We are anxious about the food we eat, about safe sex, about safe houses, safe playgrounds, cultural safety, living in a safe environment, and so on. "Children have been abused and killed and treated in this way historically in every culture. But these things mean something very different now to what they meant 50 years ago."

She traces our anxieties to the evolution of modernity, when we began questioning the virtues of science, no longer trusting our judgements and relying on religion. We have lost our faith in experts and our lives are characterised by risk anxiety, she says. At the same time, huge industries have sprung up to cater for our fears--we now trek to psychologists, psychoanalysts and dietitians to keep ourselves safe. "Our anxiety about children is a social product of modernity rather than a reflection of the real dangers to kids," she says. "Anxiety about child abuse is only one part of a phenomenon but a very intense one. Children are seen as the last bastion of innocence."

When Jones went to school in the 1950s, a "good" teacher would strap her classmates--this same behaviour is now called child abuse. As Erica McWilliam, of the Queensland University of Technology, writes in Touchy Subject, naughty children are now more likely to be shunted off to a counsellor, while teachers are encouraged to get to know the "whole child".

When David Butler began managing a Lower Hutt creche, he did the 8.30am nappy shift so arriving parents could see him changing children's nappies. Six months later, when the 50-year-old early childhood worker had built up their confidence, he began changing nappies at other times of the day, wearing surgical gloves and always out in the open. "As a male early childhood worker, you're constantly on guard. You don't do things and you're constantly thinking about how things can be interpreted," he says.

In the early '70s, Butler was the first male to train as a kindergarten teacher in New Zealand, fighting the establishment to get into the course. Almost 30 years later, little has changed--he knows all the men working in early childhood in the greater Wellington region and could virtually count them on one hand. Two years ago, there were just 23 men teaching in kindergartens out of about 1700 teachers (one man to 73 women), and just 130 men in registered early childhood centres out of about 8400 staff (a male-female ratio of one to 64). In the primary school sector, just 14% of classroom teachers were men.

When the Christchurch creche case was in the spotlight a decade ago, Butler refused to allow a child to sit on his lap. For five years, when preschoolers fell down and knocked themselves at the kindergarten where he worked, he refused to pick them up for cuddles. "I couldn't do it. The Peter Ellis fiasco was going on and I retreated into my shell. But it was absolute torture. It was 10 or so years ago and I was so careful about my public image."

When children crept towards him for hugs he pushed them away. Children didn't understand why he wouldn't cuddle them. "I had a discussion with a colleague and I said my whole teaching was being stunted. I couldn't be physically involved with the kids and that wasn't a normal part of my teaching. I decided I should forget that approach and deal with the consequences and to date there have been none."

Teachers are in danger of becoming like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, says Sarah-Eve Farquhar in Touchy Subject. She warns that a moral panic about touching has swept through daycare centres and primary schools since the early 1990s. The Wellington-based Early Childhood Research Network director says "no touch" policies in schools, kindergartens and daycare centres ignore children's emotional needs and turn teaching into a technical job.

Farquhar laments that many teachers of young children feel they have no choice but to avoid physical contact with children "unless under supervision or in an extreme emergency". She has visited kindergartens where teachers have kept children with soiled pants waiting for their parents to arrive to change them. In other cases, children are falling down in playgrounds and teachers are picking them up only if another adult is around to watch.

Fears about touching pupils are reinforced by the Education Ministry and teacher unions--in guidelines to early childhood centres, the ministry says teachers should keep a distance from children and their families "as many sexual offenders groom children and families to win confidence and trust of children and their families before abusing them".

The Education Institute's 1998 code of conduct for physical contact with children says any touch is a risk to teachers and should be restricted to seven instances--including physical education, toileting children, changing clothing, giving comfort and first aid and restraining children to keep them safe. But Farquhar says: "There exists no educational rationale for teachers holding back from, or constantly checking, their physical contact with children. The reason for these new practices is fear."

The teachers union argues its guidelines are not heavy-handed and teachers know the importance of physical contact to growing children. NZEI national president Amanda Coulston says teachers are in a powerful position working with young children and need to protect themselves and their pupils. "I've never heard of a situation where teachers wouldn't pick up a hurt child. That's taking it to an absurd length . . . At the same time, you wouldn't take a small child into a small room and cuddle them out of the view of others."

Coulston says a fear of being wrongly accused of abuse is one of a number of things steering men away from teaching. "That's a reality and they have to work with that. It's like wearing glasses and getting used to wearing glasses."

At the same time, abuse does occur. "Sexual abuse thrives on silence and secrecy. We advocate that schools and early childhood centres should talk together and have guidelines as the culture of the school reduces the risk of something like that happening," the former teacher says.

But Jones says the relationship between teachers and young pupils has become over-regulated--a point backed by Langley, who says authorities naturally reacted to the civic creche case by writing new rules. "We are dripping with regulations and it's debatable whether that has led to long-term solutions for anyone," he says, arguing that a planned code of ethics should lead to more realistic guidelines for teachers.

When editing Touchy Subject, Jones was amazed at the number of people with stories to tell. Women automatically watched men around their children, while other parents felt uncomfortable around their offspring after school talks on sexual safety. "Every single person had a story they were bursting to tell, which was affecting their every day lives.

"Few of the people I spoke with had any idea about how to intervene in what seems to them like a sad, bewildering and dangerous period in the chequered history of child-adult relations and children's education," she writes.

While we are worried about child sexual safety now, she expects in 20 years, it will be something else.

"Maybe it will be about health issues and teachers in early childhood centres will have to walk around with surgical masks on and wearing rubber gloves. We could be obsessed with healthy food and there could be rigorous food checks of what children are eating in these settings."