Manitoba is the first province to write new laws in response to a call to fix systemic problems
Anne-Marie Robinson started looking into education laws in every province in Canada with two goals in mind: to fight for better protections for kids in school and to heal herself at the same time.
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.”
The involvement of a survivor “changes the game
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.
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.
-
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 had meetings with ministry of education officials in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan regarding the improvements those provinces can make to better protect kids.
Both those provinces listened, but have more work to do to create independent structures to oversee complaints, according to Hamer.
‘Stop this from happening again
“Where Anne-Marie was really quiet, she’s become like this powerhouse in these meetings with the different ministers of education,” said Hamer.
“Nothing can be done about what happened to us … our goals are to stop this from happening again.”
Education is a provincial responsibility, but there’s plenty of room for a pan-Canadian approach — at least in the monitoring of teachers as they move across the country, said Robinson.
“There’s very little data and reporting about how many cases there are because they’re not tracked,” she said.
“So the problem of students being sexually abused by their teachers in Canada, no one knows if it’s getting better or worse.”
She said there’s an opportunity for the federal government to play a leadership role in research and policy development to support the provinces.
“Still kind of baffles me, because it should be easy to convince people to protect children. And I don’t know why this is so hard,” said Robinson.
As for her own journey, she said the policy work she’s taken on has changed her life.
“It’s healed me and it’s healing me,” she said.