Job security! They somehow manage to get reassigned to new schools where they … wait for it… abuse again. Why is this pattern so hard for those in charge of our children to recognize and stop? I’d wager to say it’s not. These abusers were recognized as abusers, so they were identified. The real question is why didn’t anyone care?
What does it say about our culture that we’re willing to give abusive, mostly white, men second, third, fourth chances when the future of our children is at stake? I would argue if someone makes a mistake there aren’t any victims who will suffer lasting damage, then sure give him another change. However, giving a grown man another chance never trumps the risk of repeating an offense with victims. Never.
In these cases a second chance is a second chance to abuse another person as much as it is a second chance at his job. Am I the only one who thinks maybe having some women overseeing these cases might improve the likelihood that these kinds of men are never giving the chance to exploit young girls again!?!!!
From the Boston Globe:
Vermont Academy fired an assistant dean in 2007 for allegedly propositioning a 16-year-old female student in lewd text messages. Yet the boarding school still produced three recommendations for its former employee, and he landed a job months later at Wesleyan University in Connecticut — overseeing student sexual misconduct hearings.
Brooks School in North Andover kicked a former admissions officer out of her campus residence in 1993 after she was accused of sexual misconduct with a male student. Even after her banishment — and Brooks’s $300,000 settlement with the student and his family — the admissions officer held jobs at two more private schools in Massachusetts.
And at Emma Willard School, a private school in Troy, N.Y., a teacher was fired in 1998 after he allegedly raped a student. But the school still wrote him two recommendations, and he later found a job at a private school in Connecticut.
The Globe Spotlight Team, as part of its ongoing investigation of sexual misconduct at the region’s private schools, identified 31 educators since the 1970s who, after being accused of sexually exploiting, assaulting, or harassing students, moved on to work at other schools or other settings with children, sometimes with a warm recommendation letter in hand.
It is a pattern that put additional children at risk. In seven of the cases reviewed by the Globe, the educators faced fresh sexual misconduct accusations in their new jobs.
Read the full story on the Globe’s site.
“Headmaster Tony Zane wrote a letter of recommendation in 1980 for Al Gibbs, whom he had just dismissed amid allegations that Gibbs had sexually abused female students in the training room. Gibbs “has had a great deal of experience as a trainer, and he is most certainly competent,” Zane wrote — the same day he sent a St. George’s colleague a letter saying that Gibbs could not return to school “because of Al’s behavior in the training room.’’ A total of 31 former St. George’s students recently told investigators that Gibbs — who died in 1996 — harassed, groped, or raped them.”
