Students: Remove sexual abusers’ license to teach

MANILA — A newly launched coalition of advocates for students’ safety bannered a strongly worded campaign on International Women’s Day that they believe will resonate with dozens of victims of campus-based sexual harassment across the country: to remove “predatory” educators’ license to teach once and for all.

On Friday, the freshly convened Safer Campuses Ph trooped to the office of the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) in Manila to submit a position paper that seeks to amend Republic Act 11313, or the Safe Spaces Act (SSA) to include the blacklisting of teachers found guilty of sexually harassing students.

Safer Campuses Ph was established on February 10 following the gathering of over 120 student leaders dedicated to students’ safety against sexual predators and enablers.

“Amidst the persistence of campusbased sexual harassment despite the SSA’s ratification five years ago, we believe in the need for stronger and more effective measures,” Kate Pauline Leonor of Safe Campuses Ph wrote in her letter to the PRC dated March 8.

Among the group’s proposed amendments to the SSA is to require schools to revoke the licenses of “campus predators” — those who show a pattern of sexually predatory behavior — and to have them permanently blacklisted.

“Predators must be prevented from having the authority to teach or work with students after their first offense. Too many times an abuser will resign or be fired only to have the option to continue the same work in a different school or campus and prey on other students,” the letter stated.

In their letter, the group also named three educational institutions where they said that the school administration either acted too slow to remove teachers accused of sexually harassing their students or had not prevented the accused educators from entering campus. Several accused also did not face administrative or criminal complaints, the group said.

“In all of these cases, the victims were unable to use the Safe Spaces Act to seek accountability from school administrations and have the predators sentenced to criminal sanctions,” the group said.

On the rare occasion that victims could file a case within their schools, they were allegedly “discouraged from pushing through because of the extensive and expensive legal process,” the group added.

The group pointed out that these were the circumstances that forced several victims to air their grievances on social media in the past years.