Stop sex-pest teachers getting away with it
It is extremely worrying that the names of only 23 teachers appear in the National Child Protection Register despite it being in existence since 2010. The database, which is administered by the department of social development, contains the names of 1,386 people deemed unsuitable to work with children. The official list is used by employers, including crèches and school governing bodies, to check whether the names of teachers they want to employ appear on it. A matter of great concern is that the South African Council for Educators (Sace) only began submitting names to the department of social development in April, even though provincial education departments have, over the years, fired hundreds of teachers for sexually abusing children. The Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC), a bargaining council for public school teachers, has pointed out that though it found educators’ dismissals to be substantively fair during arbitration hearings, regrettably none of them had been struck off the roll by Sace.
This was because some pupils and parents refused to testify in hearings conducted by Sace after previously testifying at tribunals called by the provincial education departments. Pupils were also called to testify at arbitration hearings convened by the ELRC if teachers felt aggrieved with the sanction meted out to them by the education departments. Thankfully, following a ground-breaking collective agreement signed in September, pupils won’t be subjected to secondary trauma as provincial education departments will no longer hold disciplinary hearings for sexual misconduct. This will become the responsibility of the ELRC.
The ELRC says that Sace’s closing of cases because of victims’ unwillingness to testify poses a risk of “sexual predators” returning to the schooling system. Society demands better mechanisms to prevent these sex pests from going back to the scene of the crime. A move by Sace to force new teachers, from next year, to produce police clearance certificates when they register is a step in the right direction.
An urgent priority, however, is vetting those hundreds of thousands of teachers who are already in the system.