End the Epidemic of Teacher Sexual Abuse

Commentary

Another Canadian teacher has been charged with sexually abusing students. Eight victims. As Theo Fleury can attest, the damage is permanent. And nobody believes these cases are isolated any longer.

Our public schools have not been forthright about sexual abuse by teachers. In 2017, the Toronto Star documented Ontario school boards quietly shuffling teachers with “discipline problems” between schools, hiding crimes rather than referring them for prosecution. In response, the Ontario College of Teachers then revoked 28 licences for sexual misconduct—no other action, no outrage. And in California, one school covered up decades of horrific abuse by multiple staff. What else are school boards sitting on?

The answer, by the numbers, is about half of it. Canada is systematically under-reporting teacher sexual abuse of children by nearly 50 percent. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The Facts

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) has documented more than 1,800 Canadian students sexually victimized by school personnel between 1997 and 2021. The 1997–2017 report found 714 personnel had abused 1,272 children. The 2017–2021 follow-up identified 290 personnel involved in abuse of at least 548 students, with 38 charged with child pornography offences. The rate is rising. The latest report records more than 100 victims per year.

The victims’ association Stop Educator Child Exploitation (SECE), working with C3P, has documented in an independent report that the system meant to protect students is structurally incentivized to underreport. (SECE has an American counterpart, SESAME.) SECE’s recommendation: an independent body in each province to receive complaints, investigate, and report to the legislature, supported by a national database and proper victim supports.

There is one jurisdiction in North America where exactly that has been built. Its numbers tell us how much the rest of us are missing.

In 2018 the Chicago Tribune published “Betrayed,” an award-winning series revealing 430 reports of sexual impropriety in Chicago’s schools and examining 108 cases that reached the courts. The reporting forced action.

Chicago already had an Office of the Inspector General for its school board, reporting annually to the city. To it, the city added a Sexual Allegations Unit (SAU), statutorily insulated from the people it investigates and reporting outside the chain of command that employs them. It publishes findings the district cannot suppress

From 2019 to 2025, the SAU opened 2,731 investigations and substantiated 471 reports across a student population of 316,224. Among the serious findings: 19 cases of grooming, 22 of sexual abuse, and 26 of sexual acts, with 13 further charges of failure to report. The numbers are public.

This permits a direct comparison. Over six years, Chicago recorded 48 substantiated cases of sexual acts and sexual abuse, a rate of 2.53 per 100,000 students per year. Across a Canadian student population of roughly six million over five years, C3P records 181 sexual assault charges, 137 of sexual interference, and 87 of sexual exploitation—a rate of 1.35. Assume Canadian offenders behave like American ones, and just 53 percent of Canadian abuse is being detected.

There are likely about 152 cases of serious sexual abuse of Canadian students by teachers every year. We hear about half, after the police get involved. The numbers likely apply across the United States as well.

Why It Happens

Teachers spend hours alone with children, in trusted relationships, with built-in authority. That is the job, and for a small minority, the opportunity. Pornography normalizes the fantasy, and the smartphone in every student’s pocket makes grooming possible without a closed classroom. These conditions explain why abuse occurs. They do not explain why we fail to catch it.

Why We Don’t Catch It

Part of the problem may be the rise of comprehensive sex education and gender and sexuality alliances, together with the rhetoric of self-proclaimed transgender advocates. These discuss issues of sexual identity and gender orientation, which should be discussed with qualified and cautious clinical psychologists. Instead, children are being encouraged to have private conversations about sexuality with teachers—conversations deliberately kept secret from parents. All three components—a culture of secrecy, private conversations, and absence of parental oversight—violate child sexual-abuse prevention standards.

We cannot rely on professional institutions to save us: a class at a professional day won’t help. Teachers’ unions, teachers’ colleges, and public school districts which should investigate such things are negatively affected by confirmed cases of sexual abuse. They must respond to their incentives: it is unreasonable to expect them to investigate themselves.

This necessarily erodes public trust, and the system takes it out on teachers. In Ontario’s Anthony Ross case, a teacher was fired after he had been found not guilty. In Chicago, of 2,700 claims, almost 2,000 have been dismissed as invalid, and the teachers cleared. Nobody lost their jobs unjustly. Suits by students against Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have dropped precipitously. The Chicago model protects innocent teachers better.

What Can Be Done

So why does the Chicago model work?

The answer lies in three criteria that are met by Chicago Public Schools:

1. Investigative Reach: sitting inside CPS, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and its Sexual Allegations Unit have access to complaint files, employment records, and security footage. Subjects can’t use the school system to hide from it.
2. Arms-Length Structure: reporting directly—and publicly—to the school board, the OIG, and its agents do not face consequences from those they investigate.
3. Scale: Chicago is the third-largest school district on the continent. The economy of scale supports an OIG large enough to investigate waste corruption, and an SAU able to clear teachers falsely accused as well as catch predators.

These three criteria explain why even New York’s excellent investigations division struggles to replicate Chicago’s results, and why small school districts cannot replicate the model on their own.

The issue of scale is perhaps the most important. Chicago pays $7 million a year for an office that investigates financial corruption and leads the continent on investigating student sexual abuse.  While a small school board can’t duplicate this, states and provinces—which are constitutionally responsible for education—can. Every Department of Education can have an OIG, which reports directly to the minister or secretary.

The money is worth it. By the numbers shown earlier in this article, dozens of Canadian children sitting in classrooms right now will experience sexual abuse this year. Half of their abusers will never be prosecuted.  It’s time to take this seriously.

Bring on the Inspector General.

John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education, www.parentchoice.ca

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.