I went to school administrators first and reported the abuse I was hearing directly. They asked me to take testimonies from students, which I did, at their request. I helped the students go and have interviews with them, and then they turned everything around. Very quickly, they went from acting like they were supportive of victims to actually trying to cover it up. It turns out they had been informed a year earlier, so they were in a negligent position if, in fact, abuse was identified.
When I realized they weren't going to fulfill their legal duty to report to the commissioner for teacher regulation, I had to step in and do it myself, as a teacher, which I did. I reported on four teachers, I reported on the headmaster and I reported on the chaplain for covering up, and then I just watched the whole system. It would take me a long time to tell you about the corruption, but I have lots of documentation of how completely corrupt the system was.
And I was a believer. My father's a lawyer. My grandfather's a judge. My uncle's a lawyer. I believed. I believed in school, I believed in government, I believed in education until this happened, so I went to the commissioner for teacher regulation. Then I took all the documentation and handed it over to the ombudsperson's office, because of course that's where you take things when in fact you are being basically destroyed by your own professional organization that's supposed to protect students. They are there to protect students, and it's supposed to be transparent.
Then it went to the ombudsperson's office, and three years later, when I was frantically alerting them that my student had suicidal ideation and she was still being pursued by the principal of the school even though she had gone to university, they still weren't doing anything. They were just dragging their feet.
I didn't know what to do at that point. I went to the representative for children and youth. I went to the Ministry of Education. I was frantic trying to save her. I knew she was very mentally ill and I knew he was pursuing her, and he met with her. I called the police, and they said they weren't able to charge him. The special victims police officer who dealt with all of it stepped down after that. She was just finished.
What I found was that every single governing body I went to, whose job is to protect young people and children and to protect whistle-blowers and to support you when these kinds of things happen and you're being manipulated, actually was deeply engaged in enabling the abuse.