The teachers unions of the City of Buenos Aires held this Monday a 24-hour strike “in defense of the initial level” with an act in the Plaza Armenia in Palermo. It was after the allegations of sexual abuse in a garden in that neighborhood, for which the Ministry of Education has already separated three teachers and there is a judicial investigation underway. From the garden they denounce that the City Police entered to raid the establishment during school hourswith teachers and students inside the place, and that the rest of the teaching team has been suffering attacks and threats. ask that the facts be investigated “in depth” and that the identity of the girls and the teachers be protected.
It was 11 in the morning this Monday and the Plaza Armenia, located ten blocks from the garden, was full of teachers, mostly initial teachers. At the end of last week, after the Buenos Aires police entered the garden, from the initial level the will to call the strike began to grow. According to the complaint by the teaching team of the institution, last Thursday, around 3:00 p.m. and by order of the Justice, The Police entered the garden and removed the teachers from the classrooms to carry out the search, with the students in the place. By then, the Ministry had already separated the three denounced teachers and Justice was already involved in the facts.
“When boys and girls denounce you have to listen to his voice and investigate thoroughly, we are the first to say that we want it to be investigated,” said Mariana Scayola, General Secretary of Ademys, who went on strike together with UTE and CAMYP. “You have to investigate. but the identity of the boys, the teachers and the school must be protected to guarantee the investigation process”, added Angélica Graciano, general secretary of UTE, who described the call as an “enormous display of dignity”. According to Scayola, “the garden companions who are not involved, who have nothing to do with and that they are not part of the complaint, They are receiving pressure and threats against them and their children“.
The teachers demand that the times and constitutional guarantees be respected, without involving the rest of the team that is not involved in the complaint. Also that the details of the facts be preserved to protect the right to privacy of children. “There are media outlets that expose without consideration, without caring for children and generating sentences on the institution that do not correspond to them. That violates childhood and the right to the presumption of innocence,” Liliana Caris, a teacher and psychologist who works in interdisciplinary teams at the initial level, told this newspaper.
Caris, a member of the Current of Education Workers within UTE, provided details about the police operation that broke into the garden last week: “The raid was to collect evidence but was done with extreme violence. It was about the children who were in the garden and about the rest of the workers who continued their tasks, while those who had been accused they were already separated and with Justice following its process,” he said.
During the act, a statement of support from parents of the initial level of School District No. 9 was also read. In the document, titled “not with boys and girls; neither with the teachers“, the families warned that “we are going through a delicate time to educate our sons and daughters in peace and joy. We are concerned about situations of violence in which they are left in the midst of a hostile climate, mistreatment and suspicion towards their teachers, who are neither more nor less than workers like us”.
“We cannot allow schools to become territories of conflict in which they come to hit us“, Scayola had said before, who referred to other cases of physical attacks by families who approach schools to attack teachers. “The parents who accompanied the claim raised precisely the difficulty building trust in a society where suspicion is the centrality of the discourse all the time. It’s so hard to find trust when we meet doing child care tasks in a very poor condition and with permanent disqualification towards us,” said Caris.
The case began on May 2 when the family of a child filed a formal complaint for sexual abuse, after the boy reported abusive practices by kindergarten teachers. To this were added other cases and there are already at least 10 families complaining in the case that is being processed in the National Criminal and Correctional Court N°2 Page consulted Ministry sources about their actions in response to the incident and they responded that, in addition to separating the teachers, the “Violation Protocol“and a Legal Orientation team accompanies the teachers and the management of the kindergarten with meetings.
