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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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Further to the excellent column by
Maryanne Garry (March 2), on the professional incompetence and collateral
damage surrounding the Peter Ellis case, is the disastrous impact on male
participation in education. Following the Ellis conviction,
men left preschool and primary teaching in droves for two reasons. First, they saw our justice system
as incapable of protecting the innocent and believed that they were at
serious risk of a similar miscarriage of justice. Second, they believed that men are
regarded with suspicion by a dangerously active minority and that the price
of protecting themselves against false accusation was an artificial regime of
isolation from natural physical contact with children that was both deeply
unsatisfying and entirely offensive, given that women teachers were not
similarly constrained. A generation later, there have at
last been tentative moves towards weakening these constraining teaching
regimes. However, our justice system has made no moves to correct its
appalling failures. These continue to cast a shadow over all our lives, in
the form of boys deprived of male teachers who understand them and relate to
them directly and can act as role models. The price is now measured in
massive male educational failure, which should be sheeted home to thoroughly
incompetent judicial and political leadership. |
