How could things have gone so wrong?

Full accountability should be demanded from leaders of Toronto private school EDITORIAL: WHAT OTHERS THINK

Something has gone seriously wrong at St. Michael’s College School, the elite all-boys private Catholic institution in Toronto. The school’s leaders say “nothing matters more than the safety and well-being of our students.”

And they say that when they learned this past week about serious incidents of abuse at the school, they took immediate action which included informing the police.

Yet the Toronto Police Service says it learned about the most shocking case, involving a boy being held down and sexually assaulted with a broomstick, from the media, not from the school itself.

The school’s administration finally acknowledged at the end of a very bad week that it had a video of the worst incident for more than a day before it contacted the police.

Just as troubling, it turns out the school is investigating a third incident and police say there may be other victims. Parents, students and indeed the public can only wonder how bad things really are at what has long been a respected institution turning out scholars and athletes for more than a century and a half.

What are they to make of the school leadership’s professed belief that “teaching our students goodness, discipline and knowledge in an environment where respect for others is paramount is a responsibility we take very seriously.”

Goodness and discipline, not to mention respect for others, were the last things on display in the incidents that came to light this past week.

In one, some teens were reportedly videoed throwing another boy in his underwear into a sink, slapping him and soaking him in water.

In another incident that was also recorded on a cellphone video, a boy is held down by several others and sexually assaulted by two boys with what appears to be a broomstick.

This kind of behaviour, especially among sports teams, was once tolerated or dismissed as mere “hazing.” But “hazing” doesn’t begin to capture what seems to have happened at St. Michael’s. This is far more serious; on the face of it it amounts to outright sexual assault.

The school says it learned about the incidents “with shock and dismay” and has “zero tolerance for such behaviour.” It conducted an internal investigation and “as a result, swift and decisive disciplinary action has taken place, including expulsions.”

But why on earth did it wait so long before contacting police about what was clearly a case of criminal assault? Why did the police have to learn about it from a video provided by the media?

The St. Michael’s school community, indeed any school community, deserves to know how all this could be happening. It’s fine to have codes of conduct against bullying, hazing and other forms of abuse. But these are standards that must be lived, not just put on paper. Something has gone seriously wrong when multiple incidents of abuse emerge and it becomes clear that many students either participated or stood around while it all happened.

This kind of abuse has a long history in educational institutions, particularly among sports teams. St. Mike’s itself was the site of a hazing incident back in 1999, in which a member of the football team was tied naked to a post and pelted with eggs. And at McGill University in 2005, a freshman member of the football team was sodomized with a broomstick. That led to a ban on hazing by the organization that oversees university sports across Canada.

All of which means there’s no excuse for school administrators not to be fully aware of how things can go wrong, and the standards of decent conduct that are expected in 2018.

What has come to light at St. Mike’s, sadly, makes a mockery of those standards. Parents and others connected to the school have a right to be angry. They should demand full accountability from the leaders whose job it is to uphold its ideals.

An editorial from the Toronto Star