After victims of teacher abuse asked provinces to fix systemic problems, Manitoba was the first to write new laws
When Anne-Marie Robinson started looking into the Education Act in every province in Canada, she was trying to do two things: advocate for better protections for kids in school and heal herself.
Robinson said, “I wanted to know why cases were still happening and why these kids were being abused by their teachers.”a sexual abuse survivorBased in Ottawa and the focus of a new podcast by the CBC,The Banned Teacher.
She said, “I still think it’s way too easy for a teacher to treat a student badly and get away with it.”
Robinson said that her research found gaps in every jurisdiction, including systemic problems like school boards not being responsible and investigators not being able to work on their own, as well as inadequate responses to new problems like online grooming.
Lawmakers and government officials in Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba have paid attention to what she has been doing to lobby for change.
Manitoba is in the lead because on May 30, it passed the Education Administration Amendment Act to make sure that children are better protected. It was known that that province was one of the places that needed change the most.
The new law calls for an independent commissioner to look into complaints about teacher behavior, including sexual offenses, and make a decision. The province will also make a public teacher registry so that people can see if a teacher has ever been in trouble.
Robinson and other people who had been sexually abused in school got together last year to form the group Stop Educator Child Exploitation (SECE), which works to stop this kind of abuse.
Robinson, a former federal deputy minister, said, “I worked in policy my whole life in government, and putting on that hat and seeing this as a problem I want to help fix for the whole country was almost a relief.”
Her group has been working with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, another national charity, to get their message to ministers of education and ask them to fix flaws in the system.
Survivor involvement ‘game-changing
In a report released last fall, the centre found that more than 540 alleged victims had come forward between 2017 and 2021 to say they had been sexually abused in Canadian schools.
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Data show that sexual abuse in schools is still a problem.
Noni Classen, who is in charge of education at the center, says that it was very helpful for lawmakers to hear advice and policy ideas from survivors themselves.
“I think their voices have been very important in understanding the significance and long-term effects on people,” said Classen, who called the participation of this group of victims “game-changing.”
“We now see Anne-Marie as the teacher, and we turned to her to lead us and help us understand. That makes my skin crawl.”
In Manitoba, teacher unions used to look into student complaints and accusations against teachers in a closed process until recently.
While Manitoba teachers wereAgainst some of the changes that were plannedWayne Ewasko, the education minister for the province, called the recent changes to the law “a historic step toward making Manitoba students safer.”
Classen hopes that now other provinces will pay attention and change their laws too.
“Ontario is doing really good work, and Alberta has started…”Right now, Quebec is also giving this a lot of thought,” Classen said.
Robinson and Peter Hamer is another person who was abused at school and helped start SECE., have also met with people from the education ministries in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan to talk about what those provinces can do to protect kids better.
Hamer says that both of these provinces listened, but they still need to do more work to set up independent structures to handle complaints.
“Don’t let this happen again.
“Anne-Marie used to be very quiet, but in these meetings with the different ministers of education, she’s become like a powerhouse,” said Hamer.
“We can’t do anything about what happened to us…Our goal is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Robinson said that education is the province’s job, but there is plenty of room for a pan-Canadian approach, at least when it comes to keeping track of teachers as they move around the country.
“They don’t keep track of how many cases there are, so there isn’t much information about how many there are,” she said.
“So, no one knows if the problem of teachers sexually abusing their students in Canada is getting better or worse.”
She said that there is a chance for the federal government to help the provinces by taking the lead in research and policy development.
“I’m still not sure why, because it seems like it should be easy to get people to protect children. “I don’t understand why this is so hard,” Robinson said.
She said that the policy work she has done has changed her own life.
“It’s healed me and it’s still healing me,” she said.