Who's Yur Day-School Daddy?
In the ‘I’m rethinking sending my kids to day school’ department is this letter, circulated yesterday regarding the arrest of a Jewish day school employee:
We are writing to inform you about some unfortunate news. Namely, a very part-time employee of the Chicago Jewish Day School has been arrested on the charge of transporting child pornography. No students, parents, or other staff of the school are involved in this event. More immediately, this person’s schedule in our building meant that he had absolutely NO contact with any Emanuel students.
A few years ago, at a suburban temple where I’d previously worked as youth director, a janitor was arrested for taping kids for ‘potty porn’ in the bathrooms. It was pretty shocking.
B’H, I’m glad that in this CJDS case none of the kids were involved. Both of these people were on the periphery of Jewish schools to the extent that nobody suspected anything. So it’s got me thinking: how do day schools, or for that matter, camps, synagogues, federations, or youth groups avoid having our youth unknowingly involved in some aspect of kiddie porn?
Are there source or secondary texts in our tradition that deal with sexual crimes against children? No pun intended, even on erev Purim, but school me.
So its got me thinking- how do day schools, or for that matter, camps, synagogues, federations, youth groups avoid having our youth unknowingly involved in some aspect of kiddie porn?
At the non-Jewish summer camp where I worked in high school, the camp had a lot of open land and places for bad things to happen. The camp had a very strict policy forbidding any situation where a single adult/staffer and single camper would be together and out of eye-sight of others. Adults/staffers had to always make sure there was another staffer or child around too. Staffers could be fired for violating this policy and the camp would not support a counselor who was accused of anything while violating this policy.
While sounding harsh, the policy was rarely inconvenient and it helped protect both campers and staff and could easily be applied to schools. (The camp also had a bad incident a few years before I arrived. The incident was handled appropriately after the fact, but the policy definitely set in place rules to make sure that couldn’t happen again)
Also staffers were also trained to recognize signs of emotional and physical abuse and this training was taken seriously.
No clue what to do to project against small cameras placed in bad locations (not an issue at the time), but at least the above policy prevents in person problems.