Bureaucratic punishment: when public servants act as judge and jury

He’s tried concealing his past in an attempt to get work, but a google search of his name brings up all the news reports. Two years ago, he was offered a position at a large media company. “I lasted 8 days as I was let go for ‘questionable past behaviour’. They were smart enough not to put this in print. I was sacked via Zoom.”

The only work Phillips has been able to secure involves menial tasks: working as a store cleaner, stock person and now in retail sales. He’s been lucky to find one large employer where a trusted person in management was prepared to vouch for him and they chose to ignore the mud that was still clinging to him. (If anyone is in a position to offer proper employment to this thoroughly nice bloke, I’m happy to pass on your details.)

Accusations against teachers are so prevalent that there’s a UK website set up to help teachers and carers who have faced wrongful accusations - Here’s the link.

I regularly hear from teachers that students openly boast they can get rid of teachers they don’t like by making false accusations. Here’s a comment from a NSW teacher. “Today I was a relief teacher for a teacher who recently resigned. The Year 10 class were open about what they’d done. ‘Yeah, we called him pedo every day. We broke him.’ I asked them why they did that.  A girl replied, ‘He asked me to move to the front of the class. He just wanted to perv on me.’ 

The teacher who told me this story said the girl was most likely moved because she’s a troublemaker who never stops talking in class, but the bloke would have known he couldn’t win. Either he resigned or she’d set up a complaint about him.

Bureaucratic punishment is controlled not just by the Office of Children’s Guardian, and various education departments. There are endless other bureaucrats lining up to get involved. Like the ombudsmen. There’s a Melbourne doctor who found himself facing sexual assault charges after police misinterpreted a confused statement made by his schizophrenic ex-wife. It took years for police to sort out what had actually happened, but by this time the local ombudsman was doing her best to destroy the doctor’s career, excluding female patients from the doctor’s practice and plastering his name and photographs across the tabloids, even after the police had dropped the charges. 

Just as I finished writing this, I heard from a university lecturer who’d been facing sexual assault charges, despite overwhelming evidence that the accusations were false. To his immense relief he heard a few weeks ago the charges were being dropped and costs awarded against the police. But he called me to say that his WWCC certificate has been suspended “pending further investigation” – apparently this is just in case there’s a student in his class who happens to be under 18.

We dangle freedom in front of these people only to snatch away any chance of a return to a normal career or normal life. And once again, the presumption of innocence simply doesn’t matter.