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NZ
Listener
October 25, 2003
(published October 18, 2003)
Teaching Anxiety
by Alison Jones
Alison Jones is an associate professor of education at the
University of Auckland. She is carrying out research into the impact on
primary and early childhood teachers of social anxieties about touching
children
How the Peter Ellis case ensured that suspicion and
mistrust became guiding principles of teacher-pupil relations.
It is no wonder that Justice Minister Phil Goff refuses to entertain calls
for a commission of inquiry into the case of Peter Ellis. Remaining
resolutely distant on such a fraught and dangerous subject is nothing if not
politically canny.
But while anxieties about the Ellis story build in the media, the case long
ago ensured a permanent and -some would say - disturbing change in our school
system. Even before Ellis's preliminary court hearing, the Office of the
Commissioner for Children reacted to what it called a "major
crisis" by producing the first of two lengthy sets of guidelines on
preventing abuse by education professionals. It then assisted in the
production of similar guidelines by the Ministry of Education and by the
early childhood teachers' union.
The authors of these guidelines were not deterred by the absence of
prosecutions of professional carers for child sexual abuse. They maintained
that there was "no reason to believe that incidence of abuse of
preschoolers will be any different" in New Zealand from that estimated
by North American child sexual abuse expert Professor David Finkelhor, author
of Nursery Crimes. Finkelhor's extremely dubious research calculated that daycare
children were sexually abused in the US at the annual rate of 5.5
children per 10,000 enrolled. Applied to New Zealand, these figures would
mean that about 100 children a year were being sexually abused in registered
early childhood centres. Respectable women workers were often the abusers,
according to Finkelhor.
The spectre of the abusing teacher had entered the New Zealand early childhood
sector and primary school. No longer was the paedophile a rare, sick
individual to be weeded out of the school system; now teachers as a group
were a risk to small children. All teachers had to be trained in
"appropriate touch" or touch avoidance and make sure they could be
in sight of colleagues at all times. Creche walls were knocked down or had
windows put in them; toilets were exposed to full view; new rules banned
creche workers from being alone with children or befriending their families.
The children no longer ran naked under the sprinkler in the summer heat and
their nappy-changing had to be witnessed. Primary teachers were even
discouraged from patting children on the back in encouragement. In New Zealand
we did not go as far as many schools and crèches in the United States,
where cameras were installed to watch teachers' interactions with children.
Thus pleasure in children's bodies became colonised by the paedophile. Young
men training to be primary teachers were met with the sniggering suggestion
that they: "Like little boys, eh?"
Men avoided early childhood teaching. Children's touch became experienced as
unpleasant, especially by men. Male primary teachers walked around
playgrounds with hands in pockets to avoid holding the eager hands of small
children. Outside the school, teachers became even more circumspect. One male
teacher told me he would not hold his own young daughter's hand on class
trips: "She'd want to hold my hand, which she would do normally when
we're out, but I had to make her desist from that because I thought, how does
it look? You're walking along - what's that teacher doing, holding that kid's
hand?"
Some teachers locked their classroom doors at lunchtimes to stop children
coming in alone. They had to refuse when parents asked them to transport a
child to sport. Some male teachers avoided helping children when they were
hurt, or cuddling them when they were upset. Women teachers perfected the
non-intimate "side-on" hug.
The primary teachers' union, the NZEI, in effect encouraged this reticence
and anxiety through their Code of Conduct - still in force - which states
that teachers are in a "risky" occupation and must therefore
restrict physical contact with children. The union, of course, was properly
concerned for its members, but the impact of the Ellis case was not that
teachers thought they now posed a risk to children; it was that children now
posed a risk to them. The accusing child had become the new, serious danger -
and windows, adult witnesses, "appropriate" touch, and hands in
pockets were insurance against devastating accusations.
I almost said: devastating unfounded accusations. And here is the nub of the
matter and the explanation for Goff's refusal to respond to intense public
unease about the Ellis case.
Many insist that to question the uncorroborated words of children - even in
the absence of any physical evidence that they are telling the truth, as in
the Ellis case - is to step onto a slippery slope back to the bad old days.
Child protection agencies have for years argued that abused children must be
heard, that the abuse of children thrives on their silence and on denial of
their tales.
Yet any parent knows that unquestioning belief of children has its own
dangers. At the height of the Ellis case, my own son told me about a physical
beating he had received at the hands of his father. I knew the story to be
untrue but, encouraged by my attention, the child warmed to his fantastic
story and recounted the event in dramatic and "convincing" detail.
The issues seem endless because they are endlessly complex and our social
discourse is intolerant of complexity. The media and the legal system rely on
the simple, eternally appealing opposition of right and wrong, guilt and
innocence - and the public is generally impatient with any perspective that
appears to muddy the waters.
Yet we live in murky times and, fearful of the murkiness, we have become
desperately preoccupied with safety. We are enjoined to eat safe foods, to
practise safe sex, to take our children to safe playgrounds. Now we speak of
safe airports and safe hotels. Collectively we are obsessed about risks and protection
from them and nowhere more than in the way we treat our children: they
symbolise for adults a lost social innocence, and anxieties about their
safety and protection are particularly intense.
Given the cluttered terrain, it is unsurprising that Goff is stubbornly
unresponsive. He must know that to pullout even one brick from the Ellis case
will cause the whole shaky edifice to come crashing down. It is only the
anxieties - on all sides - that are holding it upright. Calls for new
evidence will come to nothing because no new evidence is possible. The
children have already told their stories and, after their interview ordeals,
these must now be fixed into their memories.
It requires bravery and intelligence to confront this case, to unpack its
layers of panic and expose the reasonable doubt at its heart. Teachers and
other adults who work and live with children want to be able to engage
joyfully and physically with children without being objects of perpetual
suspicion. Ellis remains the symbol of this impossibility.
Even if Ellis were pardoned, the scars on the culture of teaching, including
men's avoidance of early childhood education, and the damage to the
possibility of pleasurable intimacy between children and their teachers, may
be indelible. These scars are the signs of larger anxieties about children
that obsess us. What the unresolved Ellis case does is merely cement those
anxieties more firmly in place.
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