‘Tough Lessons’: Reflections on a popular teacher with a dark secret. Do tighter sexual abuse laws help or hinder students?
GROWING UP IN THE ‘80S in Springbank, a rural suburb of Calgary, my favourite junior high school teacher was Fred Archer. He was the guidance counsellor and basketball coach, and my first adult confidant. My friends and I ate lunch in his office and begged rides home in his tan AMC Pacer (we didn’t care what kind of car he drove, as long as we didn’t have to take the bus). He pulled me up off the turf when I went down hard playing flag football; taught me the art of apology when I heartlessly called a female classmate “Moose”; and made an unexpected house call after I had my tonsils removed. Archer was the first person outside my family whom I could count on, a man who never broke my trust.
Meanwhile, as he helped to mould me into an upstanding citizen, he was sexually abusing three of my male classmates. In 2008, he was convicted on historical charges dating from my time as a student. Between these incidents and the laying of criminal charges, he continued teaching for over twenty years, apparently without further transgressions.
On the morning when the news of his arrest broke, I was surprised that I hadn’t seen it coming. I recalled his hand rubbing my bare skin under my T-shirt, the “boys only” rides home. He would take us into town to buy junk food before he dropped us off, each at his own house. Since we lived in a community of acreages, the last boy always rode alone with him in his car on a quiet country road; simple geography ensured that I was dropped off first. In hindsight, his behaviour seems totally inappropriate, but no one felt concerned at the time. Even my mom, who always considered him “a little bit funny,” never thought much of it. Archer always treated me kindly, and he had a stellar reputation. “He was like the Pied Piper,” says Jim Weed, our principal at the time. “He couldn’t keep the kids away.”
As Weed admits, school administrators weren’t so vigilant twenty-three years ago about the threat of sexual abuse. This started to change in 1984, when the Badgley Report, commissioned to determine the scope of child sexual abuse in Canada, found it to be much wider than previously imagined. Four years later, and largely as a result of these findings, Canada’s federal laws regarding such cases underwent a major overhaul, to expand the definition of abuse and remove time limits on reporting old offences.
In 1996, Sault Ste. Marie teacher Ken DeLuca pleaded guilty to fourteen sexual offences involving thirteen victims. His crimes took place from 1972 to 1993, in numerous schools. Although students levelled multiple accusations against him, the school board failed to document them comprehensively. School authorities dismissed many of the charges out of hand, and some students were threatened with expulsion or legal action for coming forward in the first place. His case prompted the Ontario government to order a judicial review, to make sure such an egregious oversight never happened again. In the aftermath, Ontario professionals working with children faced fines of up to $1,000 for failing to report suspicions that a child was being abused or was at risk. In 2008, that fine was upped to $50,000 and two years’ imprisonment — or both. The police have the authority to arrest a teacher based on a single accusatory statement — and, as per the 1988 changes, a teacher can be convicted with little corroborating evidence.