It all happened last week. Thirty-eight-year old Colleen Leduc picked up her 11-year-old autistic daughter Victoria from school and headed home. As soon as the two reached home.
Leduc received a call to return to the school immediately. One of her daughter’s educational assistants had visited a psychic and was asked if she taught a girl whose name began with “V”. When the EA answered in the affirmative the psychic told her that “V” had been sexually abused by a male between the ages of 23 and 26. The school authorities informed Ms. Leduc of all this and told her that this “sexual abuse” had been reported to the local Children’s Aid Society.
In addition to the “evidence” of the psychic revelation, Victoria had been acting in a manner that was consistent with having been abused. That in itself was relatively meaningless as her actions were not unusual for an autistic child who is approaching puberty and other children at the Barrie area school exhibited the same type of behaviour.
The Children’s Aid Society closed their file on Victoria almost as quickly as they had opened it, being satisfied that there was no abuse and that no man between the ages of 23 and 26 even had access to her. But Ms. Leduc was naturally outraged at what she had been put through and is threatening to sue the school.
To anyone who was not personally involved in this situation, the entire incident is laughable. Treating a child as a potential victim of child abuse based upon the musings of a psychic is absurd. Who knows what may have happened if a male between the ages of 23 and 26 lived in the Leduc household or had access to Victoria aka “V”? For a school to make a report of serious allegations based upon a psychic vision seems ridiculous. But in our politically correct zero tolerance world things are not always as they seem.
The school did the right thing. Had the child been sexually abused, and it came out that the school had had some prior information and simply laughed it off because it came from a psychic, the institution’s officials would have been in serious trouble. It was always possible although highly unlikely, that the psychic did have information about sexual abuse from some more worldly source. It wasn’t up to the school’s officials to determine whether or not Victoria was abused; that was up to the Children’s Aid Society and the police and the school acted correctly.
Under section 72 of Ontario’s Child and Family Services Act, the school had a duty to report if they had “reasonable” grounds to believe that a child was being sexually abused or exploited. While we can laugh and say that a psychic’s ramblings about a girl named “V” and a male in his late 20s is not reasonable grounds to believe that Victoria had been sexually abused, the school officials merely erred on the side of caution. They can hardly be blamed for doing this in our litigious society. It was a lot safer than even the remote possibility of having to go to court and argue over what the word “reasonable” means.
There is a tendency today to blame individuals and organizations for what the law says. A perfect example of this is the current criticism of the various Canadian human rights tribunals. If these bodies end up adjudicating and penalizing people for exercising what we consider rights such as the right to free speech or freedom of the press, then it is Parliament and the various legislatures that should receive the criticism, not the people who are merely carrying out their legally mandated duties. Having said that, with the use of the word “reasonable” attached to the duty to report sexual abuse and exploitation, it is difficult to see how the laudable objective of protecting innocent children could have been achieved in a less onerous manner.
It is perfectly understandable that Colleen Leduc is angry over the fact that she was accused of allowing her disabled daughter to be sexually abused when those allegations that stemmed from a psychic. But the school still did the right thing.
