When I heard the awful news about sexual assaults at St. Michael’s College School, I was overcome with sadness.
I never would have imagined that fellow students – “brothers” as we used to call each other –could be so cruel as they were in those videos showing one student being assaulted with a broom stick and another being slapped half-naked in a sink while water was being poured over him. Worse still, many students observed this and failed to intervene.
How could such behaviour happen at the St. Michael’s that taught me its motto, “goodness, discipline and knowledge”? It’s from Psalms that recognizes the idea “that being a good and disciplined individual, in charge of your own actions, is as important as the knowledge acquired through formal education”?
I don’t remember sexual assaults happening at St. Mike’s, or bullying for that matter. I generally had a very good experience when I attended in the late 1990s.
It was a place where you felt safe, almost cocooned from the rest of the world within its private school walls. It was a place where you wanted to be, even if you had to wear the same blue and grey uniform every day. It wasn’t a place where you ever expected to be attacked, much less sexually assaulted.
But there is one incident I’ve been thinking a lot about since the scandal broke.
One day in Grade 10, our French teacher didn’t show up for class and neither did a supply. We were sitting there, a full class, twiddling our thumbs. Then, one student took out a VHS tape from his knapsack. It was from his dad’s porn collection.
Another student went to a nearby classroom to ask for a TV – the kind you could roll around on wheels. I think he told the teacher we needed it for a lesson.
The tape was popped into the VCR and the entire class, except for a handful who left, watched the tape. I still remember the title: Circle Of Friends. We watched it until the end-of-class buzzer.
A few days later, the student who went to get the TV was expelled. The incident could have been turned into a teachable moment. I mean, we were in Grade 10. Our hormones were raging. We were all curious about sex and we weren’t getting any formal sex education at the school.
Instead of school officials talking to us about the incident, it was swept under the rug.
It made me feel guilty for having stayed in the room, even though none of us who did got in trouble.
At the time, I was very interested in why people do bad things. I was never satisfied with the explanations given in religious studies class, which we had to take every year. Things could be different now, but most of the explanations offered by our teachers back then revolved around notions of sin.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s recent decision to repeal the 2015 sex-ed curriculum, a curriculum which Catholic teachers support, makes teaching about consent and the real dangers of sexual aggression more difficult. The interim curriculum he has replaced it with doesn’t go nearly far enough.
And now that the pain experienced by victims of the assaults has been amplified on social media, the trauma will be something the victims will have to cope with for the rest of their lives.
We’ve seen the potential tragic consequences of this before in the case of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, who took her own life after the humiliation of being sexually assaulted and having images of it circulated online as a depraved form of “entertainment.” It’s audience took pleasure in the degradation, including vile misogynistic attacks, of another human being. At no point did they stop to think about the harm Parsons would suffer.
Similarly, the videos of the St. Mike’s assaults were posted online to entertain. I am skeptical that expelling 10 students for their part in the assaults is going to have a meaningful impact in correcting their behaviour. Indeed, school administrators did not report the incidents to police until after the story broke. And some of the parents of students at St. Mike’s are blaming the media for their kids’ conduct.
Punishment may bring about remorse. Punishment alone, however, will fail to make them truly appreciate the full extent of the harm they have caused. That has to start with turning St. Mike’s into more than just a place where young men go to obtain the academic credentials that bring elite economic rewards.
As a Catholic school in a secular society, St. Mike’s could better fulfill its religious mandate by teaching students what are supposed to be Christian principles of kindness and compassion. It’s what it should mean, to borrow a phrase I so often heard repeated, to be a “St. Michael’s man.”
