A draft amendment to the Gender Equality in Education Act (性別平等教育法) would enable campus gender equality committees to ban educators, who commit severe breaches of ethical rules, from teaching for life, the Ministry of Education said yesterday.
The bill is one of the proposed amendments to three laws regarding sexual harassment and workplace inequality, which the Cabinet approved earlier in the day.
The amendments to the educational law would outlaw teacher-student sexual relationships as a form of misconduct under gender equality rules, Deputy Minister of Education Lin Teng-chiao (林騰蛟) told the Cabinet’s post-meeting news conference in Taipei.
Photo: CNA
Faculty members are prohibited from having sexual relationships with students who they instruct, teach, mentor or engage with in a professional relationship, including making references for future employment, he said.
While current rules and regulations forbid teacher-student relationships as an administrative infraction, the amended act would treat them as illegal if the draft bill becomes law, he said.
Under the bill’s stipulations, gender equality committees established by educational institutions would be authorized to ban a teacher from teaching for life in cases of severe ethical breaches, Lin said.
The proposed changes aim to give gender equality committees strong and clearly defined legal authority to mete out penalties, Minister Without Portfolio Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said.
If lawmakers pass the bill, regulations to supplement the amendments’ implementation would be drafted, he said.
The amendments do not seek to impose a blanket ban on all teacher-student relationships, and instead apply to only those that compromise professional ethical standards and infringe explicitly on the stated rules, he said.
The draft act includes a broad range of legal enhancements with regard to protecting whistleblowers, and authorizing measures to ensure the investigations’ integrity in cases where an institution’s head is accused, he said.
The amendments mandate that the head of an institution accused of impropriety be investigated by a responsible superior and suspended from the office during inquiry, he said.
The amendments stipulate that a probe regarding the head of an institution must be conducted by outside investigators with no ties to the institution, and the school’s superior educational authority may nullify a biased probe and replace it with one of its own, he said.
Humanistic Education Foundation executive director Joanna Feng (馮喬蘭) told the Central News Agency that Taiwanese society has condoned improper teacher-student relationships for too long.
Although the draft act is welcome as a correction, its language could have been more explicit in condemning sexual abuse by teachers, she said.
Any lack of clarity could potentially be used to rationalize and defend misconduct, Feng added.
Student-teacher relationships are fundamentally unequal and the imbalance of power dynamics means a red line must be drawn on sexual relationships with students, Secondary and Elementary School Principals Association secretary-general Hsieh Chin-cheng (謝金城) said.
University and college professors should refrain from having romantic attachments even with adult students, as such relationships can create the impression or substance of favoritism, he told the news agency.
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