Bullies, not media, are the enemy

Doce me bonitatem et disciplinam et scientiam.

Teach me goodness, discipline and knowledge.

That’s the motto of St. Michael’s College School. The academy’s website further explains why goodness and discipline are placed ahead of knowledge: because goodness and discipline are “indispensable prerequisites if the search for knowledge is worthwhile.”

Such fine ideals. And I don’t dispute that tens of thousands of students St. Michael’s has graduated over the past 166 years had a solid foundation in all three realms when they passed out into the larger world beyond campus. It’s an esteemed all-boys private school.

The search for knowledge — understanding — is what the school is seeking now as it looks deeper into its own culture, what wasn’t seen or may have been disregarded that led to at least eight students expelled and half a dozen charged, boy-on-boy cruelties of criminal severity, including assault, gang sexual assault and sexual assault with a weapon.

Administrators were misguided, failing in their duty of care to students, in how they originally handled the scandal — a term that minimizes the events — by waiting a day and a half to turn over to police a video that showed a boy apparently being sexually assaulted with a broom handle, by which time police had already been informed by media which had also come into possession of a video now deemed child pornography.

We have only the principal’s word that he had always intended to give that video to police, the lag a result of trying to contact the alleged victim’s parents. This was 48 hours after the school learned of a different video which had been circulating on social media showing a boy, in his underwear, sitting in a sink as water is splashed on him. The school did contact police, promptly it seems, about that initial video, which may have been interpreted as a hazing episode.

Media are strictly limited in what can be reported about the alleged incidents, heard during the bail proceedings, and, as minors, the boys can’t be identified.

But I can report what is being said about the accused on social media and in emails sent to journalists by those who claim to be parents of St. Michael’s students.

In a word, the defendants are the “others.” Different, you know?

Bursary boys, beneficiaries of awards made to students whose families can’t afford the steep tuition at St. Mike’s.

I’ve no idea if that’s true. I do know it’s irrelevant.

Except there are some who very much promote its odious relevancy.

It reeks of class snobbery. As if boys from privileged families, or families which have made sacrifices so their sons can attend St. Michael’s, ascribe to higher values than economically struggling families. And if that is the evaluation of parents, what stereotyping are they nurturing in their kids. And who are the real bullies here? Because the violence, as alleged, didn’t come out of nowhere. Entitlement of behaviour cuts both ways. The bullied can sometimes turn into bullies.

Another finger-pointer advanced to reporters — including communications to me — is that the alleged offenders were athletic rounders, cherrypicked by a school that prides itself on athletic championships, once-upon-a-time a farm feeder for the Maple Leafs.

At least one of the alleged assaults — and there are now at least four, with the surfacing of further videos, one assault with a belt and one related to a threat — occurred in a school locker room. The Star is not repeating allegations reported elsewhere of sports teams affiliations among the accused.

But certainly some parents have gone there, accusing the school of recruiting athletestudents who don’t necessarily share St. Michael’s ethics, selected for deftness on a field or a court. And there is a palpable racist subtext to such typecasting.

You want stereotypes? I give you The Housewives of Forest Hill and Woodbridge. Oh yes, I’m deliberately indulging in facile tropes to characterize a pair of mothers who engaged with reporters staked outside an emergency town hall meeting at the school. One shouted: “You’re part of the problem!” And then, responding to a query about whether they were less upset about the violence than the public exposure, retorted: “I’m more concerned with what the media is doing to the school around this incident.”

Clips of that exchange were posted to Twitter by a CityNews reporter.

I do understand the dismay of parents and teachers who suddenly find a beloved school embroiled in such horrific events and scrutiny. But this is a huge story, sensitively reported, a story that might never have come to light at all if the incidents had been micromanaged from within the establishment. There is ample evidence to at least suspect that would have happened.

Media are not the enemy. It is fair, indeed essential, for journalists to collect as much information as possible, which includes approaching students, parents and teachers for comment, if they are willing to be interviewed, as some have. Students are not being bushwhacked for sound bites and quotes, not to my knowledge. If students have been menaced on subways and called rapists by strangers — as alleged by one of the aforementioned mothers in an interview with Globe and Mail media writer Simon Houpt (published Friday) — it’s not the media’s doing. That’s a cheap causeand-effect triangulation.

Houpt further reported that, during a question-and-answer session at the town hall, some parents claimed media had offered their sons money for a copy of the alleged sexual assault video. There is not a shred of evidence to support that allegation but it plays into a tar-and-feather narrative.

Doubtless parents and students feel under siege. That’s what happens amidst tumult and intense media coverage. The alternative would be keeping everything in-house and huddling for secrecy, which clearly many parents would have preferred. Close ranks.

I’ll tell you what’s shabby reporting: Houpt claiming that the sense of siege at that townhouse was “compounded” because a reporter “had been discovered in the auditorium and removed by security,” attributing that observation to no one in particular. Maybe Houpt was there, I don’t know.

What I do know is that the journalist in question was a reporter who stood up when the principal asked if any media were present. There was no misrepresentation by the reporter and no bundling away by security as if they’d winnowed out an interloper.

Parents who’ve understandably rushed to the school’s defence, or, dishonourably, attempted to shift the blame to purported “others” — outsiders who aren’t really the stuff of St. Michael’s proper — were surely among those who rose to give both principal Greg Reeves and school president Rev. Jefferson Thompson a standing ovation at the town hall.

What were they applauding, exactly?

Both men resigned on Thursday.

The accused, teenagers, can be forgiven, regardless of the court outcome. They are young, the brains inside their skulls not even fully developed yet. Courts are rightly merciful to young first-time offenders. These youths deserve a chance to become better human beings.

I’m not so sure that some of the adults around them will ever get there.