An article in the Electronic Telegraph Saturday 10 April 1999
By Liz Lightfoot, Education
Correspondent
False abuse charges 'ruin careers of 350 teachers each year'
THE lives of about 350
teachers are ruined by false accusations of abuse each year, the second largest union
in the country said yesterday. It called for children to be suspended and then expelled
if it could be shown that they had lied.
A large increase in allegations against the
union's members led to 156 facing action in England last year. Five were convicted.
By the time the other cases were investigated and proved to be false, careers had
been ruined, said members of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women
Teachers at their annual conference in Eastbourne yesterday.
Since 1991, the union
has dealt with 974 allegations of criminal abuse. There were no grounds for prosecution
in 792 cases, said Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary. "If this is the case in one
union, you can easily multiply it by three."
Where teachers were suspended, children
making allegations should be sent home until the outcome of an investigation, he
added. "Where children have been found to have acted maliciously it should be treated
as a very serious matter meriting permanent expulsion."
The union is pressing the
Government to back a 10-minute Rule Bill that would give anonymity to teachers and
other defendants accused of sexual abuse until found guilty.
Earlier, Estelle Morris,
the education minister, rejected the idea. When told there had been three suicides
of teachers wrongly accused, she said the Government had to err on the side of caution
to make sure that children were protected.
She argued, to cries of "shame", that the
names had to be made public to encourage other victims to come forward. In a debate
yesterday, delegates said members had suffered at the hands of malicious children.
One
pupil was proved to have banged herself against a coat hook and then blamed a teacher
for the bruises. A young married man with children had a nervous breakdown and lost
his home because he could not keep up mortgage payments after being accused by a
mother of inappropriately handling her daughter at a primary school.
After he had
been suspended for more than a year, the allegation was found to have been made falsely
by a parent who had had a previous dispute with the school. When he returned to school
some parents withdrew their children or said they didn't want them to go swimming
with him. He resigned and left teaching.
"There is a forgotten army of people out
there who have been wounded and whose careers have been ruined by malicious allegations,"
said Steve Luscombe, of Southwark, south London. The union agreed to campaign for
compensation for wronged teachers. Mr de Gruchy said it would be almost impossible
to get it from parents.
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