tim's experiment

I did not start this little outlet so that I could criticise the people still toiling in the vineyard where I laboured happily for so long, but what happened to the Sunday Post this week? Your lead headline, in the usual 60pt type, said “Convicted sex pests may still be teaching”. And since when, I wondered, did we inform readers about what may be happening? Next week: Martin Bormann may be alive and well, living in a Kowloon Tong old folks home. The following week: Michael Jackson may have faked his own death and may now be secretly touring selected Masonic lodges.  What is the point of having an investigation team (three reporters were credited) if you end up telling people what you don’t know?

The story of the story went like this. The three sleuths compiled a list of 31 school staff who had been convicted of offences in which sex was an ingredient, over the last ten years. I presume this involved a search for keywords in the Post’s digital archive. They then took the list round to the Education Bureau, and asked the EB spokesperson to find out, and tell them, which of the 31 people were now working in Hong Kong schools. The EB, and I find this neither surprising nor worthy of criticism, refused. At this point a serious investigator who wants to generate new information has to think of another move. Can we beg, borrow or steal a copy of the register of teachers? Can we compile our own by collecting school staff lists?  Alternatively, you give up the story and move on to something else. What you did not do, at least when I was an investigative reporter, was to write a story about the fact that the EB refuses to tell any passing stranger who walks in its door whether or where a person or group of people are working.

This little scandal was wheeled round a selection of the usual talking heads — chairman of Legco Ed panel, legislator for legal sector, parents’ organisation and so on — who all duly confessed themselves helpfully shocked, which was nice of them. Clearly, while reporters may not be popular, they are more popular than sex offenders, which is something to be grateful for.

Frankly I thought hell would freeze over before I wrote a piece defending a government bureeau — after all there is a whole department of civil servants paid to do nothing else — but the EB’s attitude seems to me to be entirely correct.  They keep a register. They remove from it teachers who have been convicted of offences involving abuse of their position. They urge schools to require new hires to state whether they have a criminal record, and also whether they are on the register.  Clearly the onus is on the schools to be careful who they unleash on their victims, and that is where it should be.  Some people would like to go for a more formal register, and we were taken on a quick global tour of other countries’ arrangements. But whatever changes are introduced, I doubt if they will cater for journalists who want to take a name out of a ten-year-old court report and ask where the person concerned has got to.

We also got a tour of selected horror stories from the ten-year  trawl of the archives. I could have done without this. Not only did it leave me thinking I needed to wash my brain. It also seemed to involve gross unfairness on people who were named as the perpetrators of offences merely because the reporters had been unable to find out whether they were teaching, dead, emigrated or … maybe working in the newspaper business. We also got names and details of two people who were aquitted.  They didn’t do anything, the court decided.  In any case, the charges of which they were aquitted involved adults. No doubt their joint appearance in a story about perverts in the classroom will cheer them up considerably.