An Indonesian court found a Canadian educator and an
Indonesian teaching assistant at one of the country’s most prestigious
international schools guilty of sexually assaulting three kindergarten students
on Thursday. Neil Bantleman, a guidance counselor at the Jakarta Intercultural
School, and Ferdinand Tjiong, the teaching assistant, were sentenced to 10
years in prison by a three-judge panel at the South Jakarta District Court. The
two men have been in custody since July after the parents of three boys filed
police complaints and the men’s legal team said that they would appeal. Dozens
of parents and school employees rallied outside the courthouse on Thursday in
support of Mr. Bantleman and Mr. Tjiong.
The case erupted last April when the Indonesian police
arrested a janitor who worked for an outside cleaning company on charges of
child sexual assault at the school’s main campus. The janitor and five other
cleaners who were arrested later were accused of having gang-raped a 6-year-old
kindergarten student sometime in March 2014, in a student bathroom less than 30
feet from the boy’s classroom. Five janitors were found guilty of child sexual
assault and were sentenced to prison terms ranging up to eight years; the sixth
committed suicide. Months after these allegations became public, the families
of the first boy who came forward and two other boys in the kindergarten
program filed complaints with the police also accusing members of the school’s
teaching staff of sexual assault. Claiming that Mr. Bantleman, Mr. Tjiong, and
the elementary school’s American principal, Elsa Donohue, had drugged and raped
the children and other students in the school’s administrative offices and that
they had videotaped the assaults. Ms. Donohue has not been detained or charged with
any offense and no videotapes of the alleged assaults were ever found.
Cases such as these are so extremely disturbing, I just do
not understand. It is such a shame also for this to be happening at what is
supposed to be a prestigious school. If this is one hundred percent accurate,
this school clearly needs to reconsider some of their protection for these
children, because this was happening right in front of people’s faces.
Brittany Schrum
03/03/15
12:13AM
No comments:
Post a Comment