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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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It is to be hoped that those
people responsible for demonising teachers, especially male teachers, in the
last 15 years are not still holding influential posts in the industry. The
damage caused by their unresearched and unwelcomed rules forbidding
child-care workers and teachers from touching children can never be measured,
but it must represent an enormous waste of potential, productivity, trust and
job satisfaction for what will be a generation of pupils and teachers. The
ranks of kindergarten and primary school teachers have been almost emptied of
males -- and at a time when children need them the most. Against their better
judgment, and stripped of common sense and their natural and learned
abilities to appropriately comfort and encourage young minds, teachers became
just another branch of adulthood that was uncaring and not to be trusted.
Ironically, the rules became what they were simplistically aimed to avoid:
another form of the newly discovered child abuse that was filling the world,
hijacked by militant feminists whose mantra was that all men were rapists,
and fuelled by global stories of a cult centred on the satanic abuse of
children. It erupted in New Zealand in 1991
with the absurd charges against staff at the Christchurch Civic Creche,
eventually focused on the unfortunate Peter Ellis. The Commissioner for Children
immediately declared that the country had a major crisis and set about
rewriting guidelines for education professionals throughout the system. They
were largely based on highly unreliable American research and ideology that
claimed day-care children were abused at average rates of more than five in
100,000 -- which was unquestioningly translated into 100 New Zealand
pre-schoolers at risk and a multiple of this in primary schools. The
paedophile was everywhere. The rules, promptly adopted by the New Zealand
Educational Institute, forbade touching, hugging and hand-holding -- even for
distressed children. Parents and teachers became obsessed with safety,
although the latter largely for self-preservation. Children's word literally
became law, despite experience that indicated they were capable of saying
whatever the listener wanted to hear and then believing it themselves. The
faintest whisper of "inappropriate" touching, especially for a man,
often meant the end of a career, lingering community suspicion and sometimes
crippling legal costs, even when court cases were dismissed. It was all an extreme
overreaction, sustained by anxieties that might not have been entirely
baseless, but were nowhere near the agenda-driven measures applied. The cost
has been huge. In a craft where children need friendliness, encouragement and
comfort as much as safety, the best teachers stayed clear in their droves,
with many opting out of training and successful careers. Their personal loss,
significant that it might be, is only a fraction of what the children lost by
those teachers' disappearance. The NZEI's admission this week that it got it
wrong will not cure the problem, but will begin a process of repair. |
