It’s not OK
It’s hard to believe a teacher can lick a student’s breast and not automatically lose his teaching licence.
But that’s still the case in Ontario, where the Protecting Students Act mandates a teacher lose his licence only for the most heinous and explicit sexual acts. Those include intercourse, masturbation, child pornography or contact such as genital-to-genital and genital-to-oral. Otherwise, the law does not require that the Ontario College of Teachers revoke the offender’s licence.
As a result, teachers have gotten away with repeatedly groping, grabbing and kissing students, as reported by the Star’s Victoria Gibson and Vjosa Isai in December. In those cases, the teachers’ college too often has given offenders what amounts to a slap on the wrist, such as a suspension or a boundaries course. They then go back to teaching where they can, and often do, reoffend.
That, however, is about to get a lot more difficult. Last week, a spokesperson for Education Minister Indira Naidoo-Harris said the province plans to amend its definition of sexual abuse by teachers “as soon as possible” to make licence revocation mandatory for more offences. That news is good, if overdue. But the government must be careful to amend the law to ban all sexual harassment or assaults — period. Simply adding more specific sexual acts to the law only implies that others are OK. They are not.
Disturbingly, that does not appear to be the minister’s plan. Her spokesperson said the changes to the Protecting Students Act would be “in alignment with our government’s recent changes to the Regulated Health Professions Act.”
Those changes only broadened the ban on what sexual acts would cause a doctor to lose his or her licence by making it mandatory to revoke a doctor’s licence if he sexually touches a patient’s genitals, anus, breasts or buttocks, in addition to earlier banned acts such as penetration, oral sex and masturbation. That was despite the fact that a task force on the issue recommended that doctors should lose their licence if any sexual contact with a patient is proven.
In the midst of a social revolution on what constitutes sexual harassment and assault, it isn’t good enough to list specific sexual acts that are banned. We know well that harassment and assault can take many forms. All must be cause for a teacher or doctor to lose their licence.