Protect our schoolkids

WHEN you send your child to school you do so with the understanding they will be educated, protected and cared for. Yet there are too many shameful examples from the past of that trust being betrayed in the worst possible way.

This year the Mercury has detailed instances of truly disturbing historic abuse cases that happened while children were in school and in the care of the department of education.

In March we exposed the case of a brazen Hobart pedophile who hid in plain sight behind his job as a science teacher.

Darrel George Harington had groomed and molested pre-teen and teenage boys since the 1970s, preying on children who didn’t fit in and were “never accepted for what they were”.

The education department received numerous complaints saying Harington was a risk to children.

A damning paper trail of documents obtained under Right to Information laws shows evidence of repeated accusations from parents, colleagues, students and members of the public that dated back decades. The education department didn’t discipline or investigate Harington. Instead it simply moved him from job to job.

In May, the Mercury reported that 10 plaintiffs abused as children by former priest Anthony LeClerc would pursue civil action against the department.

IT MAY BE TOO LATE TO RIGHT THE WRONGS OF THE PAST BUT WE CAN AT LEAST DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO ENSURE THOSE MISTAKES ARE NEVER MADE AGAIN

According to their lawyer, Sebastian Buscemi, there was evidence some senior departmental staff were aware of child sex complaints over the years.

LeClerc was jailed in 2015 for six years when he admitted to molesting 14 children.

For the victims, knowing their abuser is behind bars and being punished for his sickening offences is cold comfort when they see the string of complaints that fell on deaf ears or weren’t believed by the authorities that should have been protecting them.

In light of this reporting, political pressure increased with Allison Ritchie, former Labor state minister and founder of People Protecting Children, and the Greens calling for a parliamentary inquiry into why the state moved alleged pedophile teachers from school to school during the 1970s to 1990s.

On Thursday Education Minister and Deputy Premier Jeremy Rockliff committed to an independent inquiry into the department’s responses to child sexual abuse to ensure the public system was doing everything it could to protect young people.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse shone a light in some very dark places and forced those who had done the wrong thing in the past to mend their ways.

Mr Rockliff said the department had implemented 23 recommendations from the royal commission.

But for the victims of those abused in Tasmanian public schools, more can and must be done.

It’s right that the government looks under every rock for inadequacies and it’s the very least it can do for the children our society so badly failed.

It may be too late to right the wrongs of the past but we can at least do everything in our power to ensure those mistakes are never made again.