Many nations and cultures hold teachers in the highest regard, with the relationship between them and their students being compared to that of God and his devotees. However, what would you do if you witness the same revered person being “creepy” toward you or your classmates?
Some people voice complaints, while others remain silent, however, some students from Rhode Island, United States, decided to do something about it and started a “pedo database”.
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Sixth graders at Davisville Middle School considered their teacher Aaron Thomas a “creep” after observing him leering at a few female students, calling them by nicknames, and even pushing them to dance for him. All this, while he treated the “boys with contempt, and sometimes cruelty” reports Boston Globe.
They tried talking to adults about what they witnessed, but no one took them seriously and all this while they would see the girls in their class struggle to deal with the teacher’s behaviour.
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The teacher reportedly even told the students that no one could do anything to him and that he had withstood the parents’ complaints for almost 30 years.
So, the students started keeping a log of all his creepy comments, and this “pedo database” is now part of an investigation into the teacher.
In an interview with the Boston Globe, one of the boys talked about how he and his buddies started their “Pedo Database” in January 2021 to keep tabs on the teacher’s actions and words.
Talking about the girls and what they were going through he said, “Sometimes they’d laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly.”
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“Even the ones that said he was ‘creepy’ laughed, because they were obviously not trying to tick him off or anything. So they’re just fake laughing, awkwardly laughing,” he recalled.
On January 5, 2021, the boys who were now in the seventh grade started a subchannel on discord which they named after the alleged paedophile teacher, called it a “pedo database” and started using it as a platform to keep records of “the [teacher’s] pedo moments and quotes here so we can get evidence.”
In April 2022, the teacher who also served as the coach was escorted out of the school after a girl and her family accused him of conducting naked “fat tests” on teenage athletes. And then, in late April 2022, the teacher was escorted out of the middle school.
When the boys learned that people had been asked to come forward with information, they informed their parents of their “Pedo Database”.
It is now in the hands of the US attorney’s Office, the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families, the state Department of Education, and attorney Matthew Oliverio, who is leading the school’s internal investigation.
(With inputs from agencies)
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