By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The June 16, 2011 closure of the Kumasi Wesley Girls’ High School, over credible and widespread allegations of sexual harassment of students by their male teachers, is not an isolated incident or a rare case scenario, and so it is not quite clear what she means, when the headmistress of the school is reported to be denying the claim of the students (See “Kumasi Wesley Girls Closed Down” Ghanaweb.com 6/18/11).
Needless to say, the incidence of high school teachers making sexual advances towards their students, and using their evaluative power over the latter to solicit sexual favors, has been more the routine practice for almost as long as our Western-inherited school system has been in existence. And, sad to say, this patently unethical and outright flagrant practice is not confined to only high schools but even elementary and tertiary institutions. During the 1980s, for example, the magazine West Africa widely reported a similar incident on the campus of the University of Ghana that was even alleged to have involved a legendary historian and scholar – and later activist-politician – who was said to be awarding some of his female students inflated grades in exchange for sexual favors.
In that incident, the majority of the complainants were male students who felt cheated because, unlike their female classmates, they did not have what it took to level up the proverbial playing field. Needless to say, most of the female students vehemently riposted and insisted that they worked hard for whatever grades the renowned professor awarded them. And you bet they did!
Here again, on the elementary school level where the female pupils are even more vulnerable by reason of youthfulness, there have been widespread cases of rape by teachers and aborted pregnancies. In some cases, the pupils are as young as 11 to 14 years old. What is equally shocking is the method by which head-teachers resolve these at once moral and criminal issues. The easiest, and one also presumes the most expedient, way out for the chief administrators has been to seek an immediate transfer of the male-culprit teachers, without instructively sanctioning the latter in any significant manner. The result has been that these sexual predators falsely parading as educators have gone into other towns and villages perpetrating the same crimes against our youths and tomorrow’s leaders. In many instances, the emotional and psychological toll on the victims have been so overwhelming that these female pupils have been forced to drop out of school to join the teeming ranks of tomorrow’s underclass and the professionally unemployable. The secondary toll on national development has yet to be fully reckoned.
On the latter score, what needs to be done is for both the ministries of Education and Health to team up in order to offer therapeutic counseling services to these victims a remarkable percentage of whom, by the way, happens to be male. Conversely, stringent judicial penalties ought to be promptly established to take care of these sexual predators.
Meanwhile, in the Wesley Girls’ case in point, what needs to expeditiously happen is for both the state security agencies to investigate the students’ allegations and ensure that any male teachers found to have flagrantly breached their professional code of ethics are promptly removed from their posts at the school. Further, based on the degree of culpability or professional impropriety, some of these teachers could be transferred to either all-boys or coed institutions. Those found to be in grievous breach of professional ethics, could then be promptly fired.
As one who attended an all-boys middle and secondary schools for ten years, both of them boarding institutions, I perfectly believe the students of the Kumasi Wesley Girls’ High School when they bitterly complain that their teachers have the rather unsavory habit of hurling insults at them and their parents. This state of affairs, needless to say, emanates from a perennial culture of envy that makes our generally woefully underpaid teachers feel, curiously, shortchanged by many of the relatively wealthier and more professionally successful parents and guardians of these students. I personally experienced this kind of unprovoked verbal assault at both Akuapem-Akropong SALEM and Okwawu-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School. Of course, on occasion, such unprovoked verbal abuse was also unleashed by senior students whose relatively economically humble backgrounds made them feel utterly insecure in the presence of their well-heeled junior schoolmates.
Now, in terms of the hiring of male teachers by an all-girls institutions, the best solution is to give preference to qualified female teachers and make sure that the overwhelming majority of the teachers in these institutions are female. Secondly, as one anonymous wise commentator in the Ghanaweb.com chat-room admonished, male teachers hired by an all-girls institutions must be married and be nearing middle-age or older. The latter measure is, of course, likely to drastically reduce the number of young male sexual predators who envisage the plum opportunity of teaching in an all-girls school to be prime grist for sowing their proverbial wild oats. Of course, the best remedy against sexual predators and clinical pedophiles is a stringent enforcement of the law. Any status-quo attempt to domestically settle these outrageous incidents of criminality must be roundly and unreservedly discouraged.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
###