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Cautionary Tale
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2 thoughts on “Cautionary Tale”
I very much appreciate your sharing with us all something so difficult and sensitive.
I would not have known what to do in your situation and probably would have handled it the way you did. How painful!
Thanks to your generosity in sharing, now I know a little better.
I hope you find another job quickly where your humanity is valued instead of taken down like they did.
Dear Laura, I had something similar happen to me while I was teaching in the lycée. Fortunately it turned out differently. I’d like to share the lesson I learned. In my case a student who had been difficult all year asked if she could write her in class essay in French, her L1. Of course I was going to say no, since it was an English class, but I caught a glimpse of the first line she had written and decided that if she needed to get something out, why not? Then forgot all about it until I sat down to grade papers and learned that she’d been abused and was still being abused by an older brother. I tried contacting the administrator who would be my normal channel, but she was away on a school trip. So I spoke to the class head teacher, who went to the headmaster and they pulled the girl out of class and spoke to her, trying to convince her that she should “talk to her mother” and report her brother.
It turned out that, although they were very well meaning, they were wrong. When the person I had wanted to contact in the first place returned and learned about it, she immediately contacted the police. This is French law. I was interviewed, the girl was interviewed by trained psychiatrists and her “essay” was taken as evidence. She was taken out of her home and put in a safe place. Telling her to go to the police herself was wrong because it was far more than she could do. She had been struggling in vain for years, giving out all kinds of signals that she was in danger and no one understood what was going on. She was trapped in her misery and her anger. Abusers operate by convincing their victims that they deserve everything that happens to them. She had, over the years, given her mother many indications, but her mother constantly sided with the brother and would believe nothing against him.
What I learned was that we should not try to help such people by hoping they’ll “get over it” or “will make the right decision” or by giving them advice on who they should talk to. If they have been able to show us just a bit of their own personal hell, the first thing we need to do is to get them to a safe place, away from their abuser. Under French law you are legally required to signal any knowledge of abuse to the proper authorities and liable if you don’t.
When I got a chance to talk to the girl, at first she acted angry, but I told her I had done what I hoped someone would do for my own daughter if she was in the same situation. That calmed her down and she was able to move far away to live with a married sister and the brother was put under a restraining order.