I attended the school Yarra Valley Grammer (then Yarra Valley Anglican School which I will refer to as “YV”) and completed year 12 in 1990. The school is currently in the news for a spreadsheet some boys made rating girls where “unrapeable” was one of the ratings. The school’s PR team are now making claims like “Respect for each other is in the DNA of this school”. I’d like to know when this DNA change allegedly occurred because respect definitely wasn’t in the school DNA in 1990! Before I go any further I have to note that if the school threatens legal action against me for this post it will be clear evidence that they don’t believe in respect. The actions of that school have wronged me, several of my friends, many people who aren’t friends but who I wish they hadn’t had to suffer and I hadn’t had to witness it, and presumably countless others that I didn’t witness. If they have any decency they would not consider legal action but I have learned that as an institution they have no decency so I have to note that they should read the Wikipedia page about the Streisand Effect [1] and keep it in mind before deciding on a course of action.
I think it is possible to create a school where most kids enjoy being there and enjoy learning, where hardly any students find it a negative experience and almost no-one finds it traumatic. But it is not possible to do that with the way schools tend to be run.
When I was at high school there was a general culture that minor sex crimes committed by boys against boys weren’t a problem, this probably applied to all high schools. Things like ripping a boy’s pants off (known as “dakking”) were considered a big joke. If you accept that ripping the pants off an unwilling boy is a good thing (as was the case when I was at school) then that leads to thinking that describing girls as “unrapeable” is acceptable. The Wikipedia page for “Pantsing” [2] has a reference for this issue being raised as a serious problem by the British Secretary of State for Education and Skills Alan Johnson in 2007. So this has continued to be a widespread problem around the world. Has YV become better than other schools in dealing with it or is Dakking and Wedgies as well accepted now as it was when I attended? There is talk about schools preparing kids for the workforce, but grabbing someone’s underpants without consent will result in instant dismissal from almost all employment. There should be more tolerance for making mistakes at school than at work, but they shouldn’t tolerate what would be serious crimes in other contexts. For work environments there have been significant changes to what is accepted, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that schools can have a similar change in culture.
One would hope that spending 6 years wondering who’s going to grab your underpants next would teach boys the importance of consent and some sympathy for victims of other forms of sexual assault. But that doesn’t seem to happen, apparently it’s often the opposite.
When I was young Autism wasn’t diagnosed for anyone who was capable of having a normal life. Teachers noticed that I wasn’t like other kids, some were nice, but some encouraged other boys to attack me as a form of corporal punishment by proxy – not a punishment for doing anything wrong (detentions were adequate for that) but for being different. The lesson kids will take from that sort of thing is that if you are in a position of power you can mistreat other people and get away with it. There was a girl in my year level at YV who would probably be diagnosed as Autistic by today’s standards, the way I witnessed her being treated was considerably worse than what was described in the recent news reports – but it is quite likely that worse things have been done recently which haven’t made the news yet. If this issue is declared to be over after 4 boys were expelled then I’ll count that as evidence of a cover-up. These things don’t happen in a vacuum, there’s a culture that permits and encourages it.
The word “respect” has different meanings, it can mean “treat a superior as the master” or “treat someone as a human being”. The phrase “if you treat me with respect I’ll treat you with respect” usually means “if you treat me as the boss then I’ll treat you as a human being”. The distinction is very important when discussing respect in schools. If teachers are considered the ultimate bosses whose behaviour can never be questioned then many boys won’t need much help from Andrew Tate in developing the belief that they should be the boss of girls in the same way. Do any schools have a process for having students review teachers? Does YV have an ombudsman to take reports of misbehaving teachers in the way that corporations typically have an ombudsman to take reports about bad managers? Any time you have people whose behaviour is beyond scrutiny or oversight you will inevitably have bad people apply for jobs, then bad things will happen and it will create a culture of bad behaviour. If teachers can treat kids badly then kids will treat other kids badly, and this generally ends with girls being treated badly by boys.
My experience at YV was that kids barely had the status of people. It seemed that the school operated more as a caretaker of the property of parents than as an organisation that cares for people. The current YV website has a Whistleblower policy [3] that has only one occurrence of the word “student” and that is about issues that endanger the health or safety of students. Students are the people most vulnerable to reprisal for complaining and not being listed as an “eligible whistleblower” shows their status. The web site also has a flowchart for complaints and grievances [4] which doesn’t describe any policy for a complaint to be initiated by a student. One would hope that parents would advocate for their children but that often isn’t the case. When discussing the possibility of boys being bullied at school with parents I’ve had them say things like “my son wouldn’t be so weak that he would be bullied”, no boy will tell his parents about being bullied if that’s their attitude! I imagine that there are similar but different issues of parents victim-blaming when their daughter is bullied (presumably substituting immoral for weak) but don’t have direct knowledge of the topic. The experience of many kids is being disrespected by their parents, the school system, and often siblings too. A school can’t solve all the world’s problems but can ideally be a refuge for kids who have problems at home.
When I was at school the culture in the country and the school was homophobic. One teacher when discussing issues such as how students could tell him if they had psychological problems and no-one else to talk to said some things like “the Village People make really good music” which was the only time any teacher said anything like “It’s OK to be gay” (the Village People were the gayest pop group at the time). A lot of the bullying at school had a sexual component to it. In addition to the wedgies and dakking (which while not happening often was something you had to constantly be aware of) I routinely avoided PE classes where a shower was necessary because of a thug who hung around by the showers and looked hungrily at my penis, I don’t know if he had a particular liking to mine or if he stared at everyone that way. Flashing and perving was quite common in change rooms. Presumably as such boy-boy sexual misbehaviour was so accepted that led to boys mistreating girls.
I currently work for a company that is active in telling it’s employees about the possibility of free psychological assistance. Any employee can phone a psychologist to discuss problems (whether or not they are work related) free of charge and without their manager or colleagues knowing. The company is billed and is only given a breakdown of the number of people who used the service and roughly what the issue was (work stress, family, friends, grief, etc). When something noteworthy happens employees are given reminders about this such as “if you need help after seeing a homeless man try to steal a laptop from the office then feel free to call the assistance program”. Do schools offer something similar? With the school fees paid to a school like YV they should be able to afford plenty of psychologist time. Every day I was at YV I saw something considerably worse than laptop theft, most days something was done to me.
The problems with schools are part of larger problems with society. About half of the adults in Australia still support the Liberal party in spite of their support of Christian Porter, Cardinal Pell, and Bruce Lehrmann. It’s not logical to expect such parents to discourage their sons from mistreating girls or to encourage their daughters to complain when they are mistreated. The Anglican church has recently changed it’s policy to suggesting that victims of sexual abuse can contact the police instead of or in addition to the church, previously they had encouraged victims to only contact the church which facilitated cover-ups. One would hope that schools associated with the Anglican church have also changed their practices towards such things.
I approve of the “respect is in our DNA” concept, it’s like Google’s former slogan of “Don’t be evil” which is something that they can be bound to.
Here’s a list of questions that could be asked of schools (not just YV but all schools) by journalists when reporting on such things:
- Do you have a policy of not trying to silence past students who have been treated badly?
- Do you take all sexual assaults seriously including wedgies and dakking?
- Do you take all violence at school seriously? Even if there’s no blood? Even if the victim says they don’t want to make an issue of it?
- What are your procedures to deal with misbehaviour from teachers? Do the students all know how to file complaints? Do they know that they can file a complaint if they aren’t the victim?
- Does the school have policies against homophobia and transphobia and are they enforced?
- Does the school offer free psychological assistance to students and staff who need it? NB This only applies to private schools like YV that have huge amounts of money, public schools can’t afford that.
- Are serious incidents investigated by people who are independent of the school and who don’t have a vested interest in keeping things quiet?
- Do you encourage students to seek external help from organisations like the ones on the resources list of the Grace Tame Foundation [5]? Having your own list of recommended external organisations would be good too.
Counter Arguments
I’ve had practice debating such things, here’s some responses to common counter arguments.
- Teachers are nice people how dare you criticise them. Teachers like any other large group of people includes good and bad people. The issue is how well the good people are supported in doing good things, how much effort is spent on tracking down and removing the bad people, and how much effort is spent training people to be the best version of themselves. Also my father worked as a teacher so I really don’t think that all teachers are bad.
- Teachers are overworked and underpaid and you shouldn’t criticise them. When a school has 25 students in a class whose parents each pay $30,000 per annum the school can afford to pay as much as is necessary. Arguments about teachers being overworked and underpaid are a criticism of the organisation of private school and of government priorities for public schools not a counter argument to criticisms of the way schools operate.
- When I went to school no bad things happened. Did you go to YV? If not then your experience isn’t relevant to this post.
- I was a prefect at YV and didn’t see any bad things, if you saw bad things you should have reported it to me. I was not aware of any prefect who had a history of opposing bullying in previous years, I can think of some who had a history of encouraging it. Prefects were selected on the basis of supporting the system so anyone who would be expected to try to change things would have been rejected.
- Children will make false and frivolous claims so we should ignore most of what they say, therefore complaints should only come from parents. Children have considerably less ability to lie than adults and the senior teachers are much better at detecting lies than most people. Sorting out accurate claims from false ones shouldn’t be difficult but if you reject all criticism as false claims then you will definitely miss reports of bad things and allow problems to continue.
- I had a hard time at school and I turned out fine. If having bad things done to you doesn’t make you want to protect others from the same things then you didn’t turn out fine at all.
- Kids need to toughen up to survive the real world. The “real world” that I live in doesn’t involve much violence at all, even having someone raise their voice at work is uncommon. Of the situations where being “tough” due to my experience at YV has been useful almost all of them involve me choosing to help someone I don’t know in a dangerous situation while other men pretend that they didn’t even notice it. The real solution is to create a world with less violence and a large part of that involves improving schools.
Conclusion
I don’t think that YV is necessarily worse than other schools, although I’m sure that representatives of other private schools are now working to assure parents of students and prospective students that they are.
I don’t think that all the people who were employed as teachers there when I attended were bad people, some of them were nice people who were competent teachers. But a few good people can’t turn around a bad system. I will note that when I attended all the sports teachers were decent people, it was the only department I could say such things about. But sports involves situations that can lead to a bad result, issues started at other times and places can lead to violence or harassment in PE classes regardless of how good the teachers are.
Teachers who know that there are problems need to be able to raise issues with the administration. When a teacher quits teaching to join the clergy and another teacher describes it as “a loss for the clergy but a gain for YV” it raises the question of why the bad teacher in question couldn’t have been encouraged to leave earlier.
A significant portion of the population will do whatever is permitted. If you say “no teacher would ever bully a student so we don’t need to look out for that” then some teacher will do exactly that.
I hope that this will lead to changes both in YV and in other schools. But if they declare this issue as resolved after expelling 4 students then something similar or worse will happen again. At least now students know that when this sort of thing happens they can send evidence to journalists to get some action.
