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COSA -
Casualties of Sexual Allegations
Newsletter, June 1998
Falsely
accused teachers
Felicity Goodyear-Smith
COSA has had a number of falsely accused
teachers contact us in recent months. While certainly some teachers do
sexually molest children, it is all too easy for pupils to make wrongful
allegations and be uncritically believed. Pointing the finger at a teacher
gives students incredible power if they are angry with him (or her) and want
revenge for being disciplined or sighted in some way.
The case of acquitted ex-teacher Dr
John Edgar, reported in our Courts section, demonstrates this well.
Police chose to believe the boys rather than Edgar and other witnesses
including fellow teachers. By all accounts, Edgar was an excellent teacher,
and his loss from the profession depletes the already tiny pool of men
prepared to teach in the 1990s.
Edgar has called on male teachers to quit in interests of their safety. COSA
can appreciate his concern, and endorses his claim that teaching leaves them
wide open to sex abuse charges. However we are gravely concerned by the loss
of men from our schools. With the excessive rise in children being brought up
by solo mothers in the past 2 decades, so many children lack any male role
models in their homes. And not only are men too frightened to teach – they
are also wary of being sports coaches; scout masters or instructors of other
extra-curriculum activities for fear that they are accused.
The protective actions now promoted for teachers such as avoiding all
touching of children and never being alone with a child may help prevent some
from being accused. However they are not sufficient for all. COSA knows of
cases (including the Edgar case) where the abuse was supposed to have
occurred in full view of pupils and/or teachers, yet the police persisted
because they believed the child complainants’ testimony. The non-touch policy
may be useful, but it is tragic that a teacher cannot comfort and clean up an
injured child; lend a shoulder to the deeply distressed; reward an
achievement with a pat on the back, or offer physical support in gymnastics
without being accused of ‘inappropriate touching’. Nor are these measures
realistic. Teachers may find themselves alone with pupils no matter how hard
they try – a child might enter the classroom where a teacher is working alone
during a break; some subjects such as music tuition are expected to be taught
on a one-to-one basis.
The New Zealand Education Institute (which acts as a teachers’ union) is
minimising the problem. They recently stated in a teachers’ publication (Eduvac 4 May 1998, sexual misconduct
allegations a rare occurrence: NZEI Chief, 3) that it is rare for teachers to
face false allegation charges. From the many stories were have heard from NZ teachers
over the years, COSA would have to disagree.
Part of the problem is the never-ending expansion of the definition of
‘sexual abuse’ and the instruction students get from pre-school days about
‘bad touch’ and the terrible psychological damage it causes. This environment
makes it all too easy for children to misinterpret or distort innocent acts
as having sexual ‘intent’.
They may also decide retrospectively that a sexual encounter must have been
‘abusive’ because a boy or girl-friend has rejected them, or they have fallen
out. Recently 201 girls and 176 boys aged 16 to 18, from 45 Auckland High
Schools, were surveyed about sexual abuse experiences. The results, published
in the CYPS publication Social Work Now,
found that nearly half of the boys and 65% of the girls had experienced
‘sexual abuse’ while dating. Abuse was defined from unwanted kissing through
to sexual intercourse. Most adults will recall adolescent sexuality as
minefield to navigate. Early sexual experiences might be exciting, painful,
confusing, over-whelming. While in no way endorsing unwanted sexual advances
being forced on teenagers by their peers, I suspect that in many instances
the mutual fumblings of inexperienced sexually aroused teenagers are being
excessively elevated to the status of ‘sexual abuse’. One of the dangers of
this definition, of course, is that serious sexual molestation gets
trivialised.
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