Denounce or keep silent? Protect a teenager against her will or “mind her own business”?
Posted at 5:00 am
Amélie* didn’t ask herself the question for long. On the start of term in the fall, she wrote to the principal of Ozias Leduc Secondary School to denounce a teacher.
All summer, this 64-year-old teacher had spent hours “texting” and chatting in teams with a 14-year-old student.
Suspicious…
Amelie is 20 years old. She worked all summer 2022 with Béatrice*, this 14 year old student. Every day, Béatrice confided in her her relationship with this teacher who was so attentive, so sensitive, so cool.
Sometimes Beatrice came to work tired: she had “chatted” with the teacher until 3 a.m.
“I’m not sure it’s prudent to run your business…
“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” Beatrice replied.
The more she found out, the more Amélie worried. The teacher didn’t just listen actively. Again and again he made sexual innuendos.
When the teen commented on the teacher’s physique and hand size, he replied that “it’s not the only thing fat” about him.
He commented on her cleavage. He wanted to know details about her sex life, her relationship with her ex-boyfriend. He sent her eggplant, peach and tongue emojis. He said when she was 18 he would hug her. She seemed to enjoy it.
Everything was done in writing. They haven’t seen each other. But when there was evidence of a physical approach after the start of the school year at the end of August, the teenager told Amélie that she feared the teacher was becoming “too sticky”. Even if she said she hasn’t seen anything reprehensible in her statements so far.
Béatrice asked Amélie to keep the secret. When Amélie heard this, she thought she heard the teacher’s own words from the student’s mouth.
She didn’t really hesitate, I said. She denounced the situation at the school on August 30. The teacher was immediately suspended. In the fall, he quietly withdrew.
Last week, Amélie’s mother said to her: ‘Did you see that in Le Journal de Montréal? There was a pimp teacher in Ozias-Leduc…”
The man’s name is Serge Dupuis. He taught science at this school in Mont-Saint-Hilaire for 15 years. Neither Amélie nor anyone else in Mont-Saint-Hilaire knew that this teacher had been convicted twice of procuring in Quebec in the 1990s.
Incredibly, Dupuis has not lost his teaching license. Even more incredible is that he managed to get hired at Ozias-Leduc. And when the government ordered criminal investigations into teachers, nothing was found on them.
However, the Nebraska man had not been convicted under a false name. Not even in another province. It happened 200 kilometers away. Better still, his beliefs had made headlines.
Le Soleil, October 25, 1997: “A physics teacher at Vanier secondary school, Serge Dupuis, 38, was accused yesterday of heading a prostitution network for which he recruited minors, including some students from her school. »
Le Soleil, November 28, 1997: “It appears that Serge Dupuis, that Vanier high school teacher who was accused on October 24 of pimping female students, has not learned his lesson. He was arrested again on Wednesday evening along with three young girls in the parking lot of the Jessy motel on Boulevard Hamel. »
He pleaded guilty in December 1997 and was sentenced to one week (seven days) in prison for living off the fruits of prostitution. Released in February 1998, he was arrested again a month later at the head of a new network of “hostesses”.
Le Soleil, June 11, 1998: “The famous professor and pimp Serge Dupuis was sentenced yesterday to two years less than a day in prison. »
In 2007, one has to believe that his fame hadn’t gone to Montérégie: he became a science teacher at Ozias-Leduc.
The school took Amélie’s letter seriously. Dupuis was quickly suspended. He no longer taught at the school.
But it wasn’t until February 15, when Le Journal de Montreal uncovered the affair, that the school wrote to the parents. “A flaw in the procedure, explained by human error,” allowed Serge Dupuis to teach and continue to be in contact with minors, despite three convictions.
Given Dupuis’ serious background, didn’t you try to point out the reasons for this suspension to the parents, the teachers? Should we wait hidden under a rock until it comes out in the newspaper – or not? Maybe nobody will notice…
A bit as if, in order not to look bad, we hoped that everything would pass quietly.
A bit like lawyers dictated the letter and the one from the school service center. We know what the first piece of advice from lawyers in general is: Above all, don’t admit anything! We should never admit responsibility!
There were no reported casualties, but this exorbitant negligence alone put this repeat offender pimp in contact with teenage girls for years and potentially put them at risk.
A vague “human error”, like an administrative fog.
In early February, the police called Amélie. The investigations are ongoing. Maybe we’ll ask him to testify…
At the end of our conversation, Amélie explained to me why she had sent her letter.
“It’s my responsibility anyway!
“I said to myself, ‘If I ever found out she was abused and I didn’t do anything about it, I would be responsible. »
Remember well. She didn’t say: I would feel guilty, otherwise I wouldn’t have forgiven myself.
NO. She chose that challenging word, that fundamental word that makes organizations so scary where there is only one way: accountable.
* Fictional first names