World Teachers’ Day is usually an opportunity for great cheers of admiration for the many thousands who strive to do right by the 12-million or so youngsters in our schooling system.
To those of you who do honour your professional duties, I add my voice of appreciation. But — and this is a very big but — recent events oblige me to raise again a very dark side of the education system.
Newspaper reports last month told of how a teacher at a school in Vanderbijlpark, Gauteng, confessed in a South African Council of Educators (Sace) disciplinary inquiry in 2002 that he had had sex with a 13-year-old girl learner. He was found guilty of statutory rape. He faced several mild sanctions — a R5 000 fine, a year’s counselling — and continues teaching to this day at the same school. The raped learner has since left the school.
This teacher is obviously not alone in choosing to violate a learner sexually. It’s so commonplace, in fact, that a 2002 study found that 33% of rape survivors were girls who had been raped by members of the school community. It’s so common that many schools simply tolerate it as a fact of life.
But this case stuns me in particular because neither the employer — the Gauteng department of education (GDE) — nor Sace followed the law. And the law is blisteringly clear about this.
The Employment of Educators Act states that an educator must be dismissed if he or she is found guilty of sexual assault against a learner. Which part of this did the GDE and Sace not get?
As a result of the media coverage, Sace is promising to review the judgement and the GDE is doing its own investigation. But the fact that they are now acting in light of the public outcry is little comfort. It’s too little, too late.
As for the criminal justice system: apparently, three years on, a criminal charge is still pending.
Teachers who hold the view that the rape of children is just one of those things we have to live with should be aware of another very clear law: the Child Care Act puts a legal duty on every educator to notify the authorities if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting a child is being abused. It makes it every teacher’s business to act decisively to protect the children at their school.
Establishing a sex offenders’ register — like the United Kingdom has, for example — may help protect our children. At least there would be a central database of individuals who must be kept away from children. Perhaps, then, the child in the North West raped last month by a taxi driver while on a school trip would have been spared the horrendous experience. This taxi driver was a former teacher who was fired after being convicted of indecent assault on a minor.
But, when our authorities fail to follow the laws and mechanisms that already exist, it’s hard to see how introducing another is going to make any difference at all.
As a philosopher once said: ‘All that is required for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” Honourable teachers have got to speak out.