By Ruel Johnson
Monday 4th of December, marks two weeks since I sent a letter of complaint to the Chief Education Officer, Marcel Hutson, reporting what I had discovered to be predatory behaviour by a teacher at a senior high school, targeted at young female students.

Since that time, this society has gone into an uproar over the disclosures, particularly in the wake of my deliberately making the complaint available to the media and outing said teacher for what I maintain is a two-decade long history of predation.

It is my understanding that the Guyana Police Force is looking into the issue and so I will refrain from commenting further on any specific allegations against the teacher.  What I want to focus on instead is the fact that he was allowed to operate as long he did, this society’s reaction to the revelations, and what are the steps I believe should be taken going forward.

The Systemic Facilitation of Predation
A few months ago, I watched the move Spotlight for the first time.  Winner of multiple awards, including a Best Picture Oscar, the movie covers the events leading up to the Boston Globe’s investigation into and reportage on the Catholic Church in Boston covering up sex abuse committed by priests in the archdiocese.  In the upcoming months, there is going to be an extensive  media coverage on the issue of predatory behaviour by teachers in schools in Guyana and I would recommend watching the movie to try understand what took place, and currently still is taking place.

In investigating the teacher – and here I should state that I have been a journalist for 14 years, most of those as a senior journalist – one of the things that stood out for me was the parallels his early career had with some of the priests associated with abuse in Boston.  Between the years 1997 and 2005, the teacher in question taught at about seven public and private institutions, an average of about one per year – with the exception of one, persons have come forward to level allegations of his behaviour at each.  As with the Church in Boston, there seemed to have been some sort of cycle of discovering the behaviour and transferring it elsewhere.

Last Friday, even as Guyana is confronting its own issues with teacher predation, the Toronto-based Canadian newspaper, The Star broke a story about teacher sexual abuse and how transferal systemically facilitated continued deviant behaviour.  The story, “‘One wrong just creates another wrong’: How the quiet transfer of teachers over disciplinary issues has led to patterns of abuse in schools”, notes the following:

“The Star identified 27 cases heard by the Ontario College of Teachers, the provincial oversight and licensing body, between January 2012 and November 2017. In each case, the teacher had been investigated by their school board, disciplined, and transferred at least once by the time their case made it to a college hearing. In all of the cases, the college’s disciplinary panel — made up of publicly appointed and teacher-elected college members — substantiated allegations of sexual, physical, psychological, verbal abuse or serious misconduct by those teachers. In nine of the 27 cases identified, the teachers had re-offended at their new school.”

For about eight years, the system in Guyana seemed to have passed the problem of this particular teacher on from school to school, institution to institution.
And then came Bishops’.  In Spotlight, much of the focus was placed on the role played by the head of the Boston Archdiocese, Cardinal Law, the man who was instrumental in the covering up of sexual abuse and the protection of predatory priests.  Around 2006, the teacher who has bounced around from institution to institution, hounded by claims of sexual abuse, would find his most lasting home.

Report after report by former and current students, teachers, parents and other persons point to the systemic thwarting of sexual predation complaints against the teacher covering the larger part of his career at Bishops’, spanning headmistresses.  Bishops’ had to have had (indeed likely still has) its own parallel to the Cardinal Law, a person under whose powerful protection a predatory teacher would have sheltered for over a decade.

In brief, during the latter part of the man’s career, the systemic facilitation of predation shifted significantly from transferal to institutional protection.  When the dust settles, and pending what should be an independent external investigation into the administrative system at the school, I expect that this is going to be one of the key revelations concerning why what took place took place for so long.

What the Law Says and Doesn’t
When it comes to the issue of teacher predation, the law is fairly clear.  Under Section 19 of the Sexual Offences Act, someone in a position of trust is criminally liable if they have a sexual relationship with someone under their care who is under the age of 18.  There is a distinction between penetrative sex (by other definition oral, vaginal, anal) and other sexual activity.  With regard to education institutions, the prohibition of sexual contact is not relegated to teachers alone, but anyone who is part of the school administrative system, from the security to the cleaners.

The law also says that anyone who is found seeking to prevent a victim’s account being reported to the proper channels is also liable – what this means is that if a student, or parent, were to have sought to report the teacher’s behaviour to the school administration and that report were discarded or ducked, the person or persons responsible for ducking it can be charged.  Another section of the law also speaks to the facilitation of sexual exploitation, also criminal under the SOA.

Part III, Section 41 of the Sexual Offences Act speaks to the issue of mandatory investigations into a reported offence under the Act, but the major shortcoming here is that nowhere does it refer to the police being obligated to independently investigate potentially connected cases.

When you consider the sociocultural apathy on issues like sexual grooming and the sociocultural tendency towards victim-blaming young women; the institutionalised suppression of complaints that existed or exists within Bishops’, and unclear reporting mechanisms in schools in general; and the poor protections of confidentiality afforded victims in general, what we have is a system that is practically tailored to make the law ineffective in the case of mass or serial predation.

On the Concept of Due Process
I’ve seen, particularly as pushed by the key lawyer for the accused, that the publicity surrounding the accusations has somehow affected the teacher’s right to due process.  This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how due process in terms of legal procedure works.

If a public allegation is made against someone for a specific crime or act that they did not commit, due process under the law is handled under the Defamation Act, wherein the person making the defamatory statement is liable to criminal penalty of up to two years in prison.  Under the Sexual Offences Act, a person making a false complaint can be charged and on conviction sentenced to three years in prison.  In essence, the law provides for due process for the accused in the case of both public exposure on a false accusation as well as false accusations to the police.

The area of actual due process that most people seem ignorant of or unconcerned about is that which speaks to the victims of predation having clear and unobstructed systems of reporting.  Within the school system, the school administration is both the first line of defence against predatory activity and the primary reporting mechanism in the event that it happens – in brief, it is a critical component of the system of due process.

Every single occasion in which a child or parent or teacher approached Bishops’ admin to complain about the teacher’s predatory behaviour and found their complaints ignored or thwarted or berated, due process was grossly interrupted, both in that instant, as well as in terms of future implications.  Any current investigator seeking to discover whether indeed he had a history of complaints against him that would make any subsequent complaint credible and therefore cause for dismissal and/or prosecution, would likely find no institutional evidence of such because the system which is intrinsically prejudicial to the teacher, did not likely record such complaints.

What makes the situation so viral in the media is that while most people find grooming young girls to be absolutely heinous, others seem more concerned with the public embarrassment of the individual accused than the private torture of his victims as covered up by the institution.  If there were one category of people here who had the greater right to a presumption of innocence, it is the young victims for whom the system meant to protect them refused to afford due process to them.

Legal ethics and Victim Shaming
When the accused and his three lawyers – Jerome Khan, Priyanka Sookraj, and Siand Durjhon – among whom was a young woman who could easily have been the target of his advances, held a press conference in response to my general complaint of alleged serial predation against the teacher in question, the purpose was two-fold.

The first was to discredit my motives in bringing the complaint to the Chief Education Officer and to frame them within a non-existent competition of egos between myself and the teacher, including the absurd claim that I would risk a defamation suit and possible dismissal from my senior post in government on the basis of social media arguments in which I was proven ‘intellectually deficient’.

The second, and more sinister purpose of the press conference was to pre-emptively identify and shame one survivor of the teacher’s predation by publicly associating her with me, and then framing my motives against a background of personal jealousy as a flimsy excuse for justification of that public shaming.  It was untrue, it was unethical, it was slimy, but it is also quite possibly illegal.

Under Section 62 of the Sexual Offences Act which speaks to Anonymity for the Complainant “publication in any document, or the broadcasting, or transmission in any way, of any information that could identify the complainant or witness to an offence under this Act is prohibited.” I personally believe that all three attorneys should be subject to censure of some sort, whether under the provisions of the Act or under any governing rules of ethical conduct that govern the members of the Bar.

The Media Response
The media response to this case has been mixed overall with Stabroek News and Newsroom standing out for the breadth of their coverage on this issue.  What continues to be missing overall however is the sort of necessary depth of coverage that this admittedly complex issue warrants.

As someone who has been involved in investigative journalism, in editorial management and who is currently responsible for editorial policy in a media entity, I know the constraints of investigative journalism in general.  Deep feature investigations like the one featured in Spotlight require resources – human and financial – that media agencies simply do not have at their disposal.

That said, what seems to be missing generally is an instinct or intuition or impetus towards where to look and what for.  No one, for example, has sought to investigate a very basic component of the narrative, which is whether or not there was any previous complaint made against any teacher at Bishops’ over a specific period, and if there were, what were those matters and how were they dealt with.  The teacher’s record of employment at previous institutions should be critical to establishing whether or not there was a pattern to his behaviour before.

On Good People and an Inverted Society
When I first made the decision to actively do something about the teacher predation issue at Bishops’, one person I informed sarcastically and vehemently asked if I felt I had a Jesus complex, meaning a messiah complex, some misguided sense of a burden of responsibility to fix real or perceived wrongs.

While I can easily dismiss criticisms of my motives in this, or defend general attacks upon my character, and can more than ably justify my role, I actually agree enthusiastically with any credible person who says that I am not the most fit and proper person for leadership or even significant prominence on this issue.  I am in fact an incredibly flawed man with a less than stellar history with women.  I am unkempt and crude and foul-mouthed and I don’t go to church on Sundays. I actually therefore have found it somewhere between appalling and absurd that these young women have come forward to me, and I see it as an indictment of the society that I live in.

Over the past two weeks, I have seen good citizens impugn their own character in trying to defend either the teacher at the center of the accusations or the image of the school in which he was allowed to operate.

One source of angst for me in all this has been precisely how much information to release to the public, and what sort of information best serves the public interest and when.  When I labelled the issue a psychosocial phenomenon, it was because I recognised this quality in Guyana in relation to both the normalisation of predatory behaviour as well as the rejection of even the possibility that it could be even at a fraction of the scale that I’ve discovered it to be, even as people are ironically saying that this is something that is not only widespread but has long been endemic to this society.  In essence, we accept that it happens, and has been happening, but we reject the possibility that it would happen at Bishops’ of all places.

Here is what I can guarantee.  This situation is much wider than any single teacher, even in Bishops’.  It involves not only perpetrators but a system of facilitation that goes from direct suppression of complaints to a deliberate institutional blindness that transcends any single school.  It isn’t facilitated by an unkempt, bad boy, renegade government advisors but by good, respectable, churchgoing people with husbands and wives and families, people who were either directly party to what was going on, or for whom image and status were considered more important than the protection of girls who, in their minds, had the primary responsibility to not be lascivious and tempt a respectable man, a good teacher who dressed well and produced good grades for a good, respectable school.

Good people – parents, lovers, husbands, family, friends – also contributed to upholding the system whether out of shame or fear or of a sense of impotence.  Some survivors are wives whose husbands would turn on them for falling prey; some are daughters whose parents know but who don’t want to come forward for fear of a ‘scandal’, or simply don’t want to fathom a conversation with their child about the possibility of what might have happened; friends who blame the survivors for not being strong enough or moral enough.
I stand by what I’ve said because I believe these young women who have come to me, and I believe their friends who witnessed his behaviour, and I believe the teachers who confirmed that it was known in the school.

That belief is the basis for my commitment to ensure that there is an institutional change in the aftermath of all this.  I know that introspection for the average good person is a painful, often valueless exercise.  In every society throughout history, people have accepted a certain communally agreed quantum of dysfunction as the basis for functionality, particularly as guided by sociocultural institutions.

In Boston, the Catholic church was an institution the myth of the sanctity of which was critical to society it functioned in.  In Guyana, Bishops’ had a history that was premised on colonial era class and respectability.  It is precisely that façade of goodness that allowed such banal evil to fester and metastasize while good people continued to narrow their vision to avoid what would have been right before them.

What has been in the public domain on this issue is the tip of the iceberg.  If there is going to be any sort of meaningful inquiry or investigation into the full dimensions of this issue, it is going to take this inverted society into a place of unprecedented darkness and division.  Familial, communal and professional bonds will be tested and broken, political pressure will be brought to bear either way, and the system of justice tested on an issue of fundamental decency.  It is a process that I believe we have to endure however because the alternative is unspeakable and indecent. The question for the good people in this inverted place is, what do you intend to do going forward?

What I Intend to Do
From the moment I recognised that there was an institutional component to the sexual predation situation at Bishops’, I began to plan ahead with regard to how we could create the sort of system that would significantly mitigate its reoccurrence in the future.
Victim accommodation – Firstly, there needs to be a mechanism in place to ensure that the victims that have come forward can share their stories with competent social work professionals and receive the treatment they deserve.

In that regard, I am in discussion with a small organization that has ongoing work with the Child Care and Protection Agency to establish a protocol for doing so.  I have also spoken to the group with regard to use their Facebook page as portal to which new victims coming forward can report. Week before last I requested that CCPA Director Ann Greene assign a liaison officer to monitor the information processing and I’ve already had, through Ms. Greene’s facilitation, a preliminary meeting with that officer to explain the scope of the problem and to show him examples of the complaints I have received.  I’ve also spoken to GT&T about assigning a special national hotline for victims of teacher predation and have been informed that this is possible.

Judicial and institutional dimensions – I can say, without prejudicing confidentiality, that at the investigative level there is requisite attention being paid. However, considering the tragically low incidence of reports of sexual assault in general, the low incidence of convictions in sexual assault cases, the complexity of proving abuse of trust sex crimes, and the unprecedented scope of what has taken place at Bishops’, I believe that this case warrants special attention, both in terms of the school system as well as the judicial system.  I reiterate that this is an issue that warrants Cabinet attention as well as action and the degree to which this is addressed, or not, will be impact the administration social services scorecard.

Continued advocacy – I have reached out to a small group of people who have been passionate about this issue and will assist them in forming a standing mechanism, ideally an NGO or NGO forum that complements the admittedly limited state resources in this area.  The central objectives of this mechanism would be to monitor the ongoing investigation into the Bishops’ affair; investigate reports of teacher predation in general, link the victims to partner social work institutions as well as state mechanisms, and monitor cases that enter the legal system; and provide information to the general public on the processes involved in reporting predatory behaviour.

Take a break – While I am committed to this process to a certain degree, I am not the least bit qualified to replace what should be institutional and social mechanisms to deal with this issue.  My annual vacation started the beginning of this month. I intend to take most of it, enough to get back to my writing and to spend time with the people that matter most to me, my partner, my son, and my family and friends.

What I Don’t Intend to Do
…cave in to the very same special interests who turned a blind eye to, or were active participants in, the mechanism that was designed to stalk, groom, sexually exploit and then stifle the voices of the girls of the Bishops’ High School for more than 10 years.  Not once.  Ever.