Dirty little secrets Knowledge is an important protection against sexual assault

Dirty little secrets
Knowledge is an important protection against sexual assault

February 2, 2002

Earlier this week, an arrest warrant was issued for a former MCHS administrator accused of sexual contact with students.

There are two important words here: "accused" and "students." An arrest is not a conviction. This is America, where suspects are still considered innocent until they’re proven guilty. An arrest warrant shows, though, that investigators, the district attorney and a judge all were convinced that the evidence of a crime being committed was sufficiently compelling that they thought the accused should answer the allegations in court.

The second important word is "students," and that’s the one that makes this case most troubling. Students have a reasonable expectation of safety in their schools. They, and their parents, have the right to believe (among other assurances) that administrators and policies provide significant protection against sexual contact between students and educators. That’s the way the world is supposed to work: the adults protect the children.

When that system fails — and it occasionally will — students and parents have a right to believe that their concerns and complaints will be taken very, very seriously. An administrator accused of inappropriate contact with a student should be removed from his duties in a manner that balances his rights with the responsibility of safeguarding all students. Allowing him to go on down the road to another district populated with unsuspecting students may protect Re-1 from the threat of a lawsuit by the accused, but it doesn’t fulfill the district’s moral responsibility.

School districts aren’t alone in attempting to sweep the problem under the rug. The Catholic Church has a similar tradition of sending offending priests for "treatment" and assigning them to a distant parish, while fighting legal claims that it is responsible for the welfare of its parishioners. At least one Re-1 board member has vowed not to spend one cent of taxpayer money on lawyers — a nonsensical goal, since at any given time the district is involved in legal wrangling, and also a wrong-headed goal, because sometimes that money is worth spending.

Early last fall, students knew what was happening. They talked among themselves, and some of them talked to adults who took steps to intervene. The community at large wasn’t allowed to know, however, because the district’s concerns about legal liability overrode its commitment to actually dealing with the problem. The week before Christmas, the school district blocked distribution of an edition of the Panther Press, the MCHS high-school paper, with a front-page story revealing the allegations against John Fontes, who had submitted his resignation Oct. 31. A sanitized version was distributed to students.

How much better it would have been for administrators to say they could not discuss specific cases except with the students involved, but to otherwise offer a frank discussion of the issue, including assurances that complaints by students would be heard and addressed. Instead, the message student journalists received was, "Hush! Don’t tackle tough topics. You might get sued, and that’s the worst thing in the world that can happen."

No, it’s not. It’s expensive, but it’s nowhere near as traumatic as sexual assault. Sometimes, in order to do the right thing, we have to take risks. We have to teach our young people that it’s important to stand up for the truth – even in court, with attorneys to advocate on our behalf, if that becomes necessary.

Silence doesn’t make the problem go away. The light of day is a powerful weapon, and it sometimes dispels the need for complicated court battles. Truth is an absolute defense in libel cases; if student journalists had been told the truth and allowed to report it, they were in no danger of losing a lawsuit.

No one should be subject to unwanted sexual contact, whether by an educator, a clergy member, a parent, an acquaintance or a stranger. The amount of time that elapsed between the first complaints and the issuance of an arrest warrant may not have been long as these things go, but those months must have seemed like a lifetime to students who felt that little was being done to right the wrongs and to protect other students. That’s not the message we want to give our children. The rights of the accused must be considered, but they must not be allowed to prevent students from knowing the dangers they may face. They deserved, and needed, to know a crime was being investigated.