The Taipei City Government on Friday admitted to negligence over the handling of an alleged preschool sexual assault case in 2022, and said that two departments involved in the case would be investigated by a performance review committee.
A Taipei City Government official said the government would report the city’s education and social welfare departments for their negligence in dealing with the first report of allegations in 2022 that a preschool teacher sexually abused children, and also proposed 10 suggestions for improvement.
Preschool teacher Mao Chun-shen (毛畯珅), a son of the owner of Taipei Piramide School (私立培諾米達信義幼兒園), a private institution, in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義), was indicted in August last year on charges of sexual assault and offenses of forced obscenity against six girls.
Photo: CNA
Prosecutors said they found that Mao owned more than 600 sexually explicit images or videos of girls he allegedly abused, and that he had allegedly sexually assaulted at least 20 children at the preschool.
The court is expected to reach a verdict on these charges next month.
However, some parents in 2022 reported suspected sexual abuse by Mao. He was not suspended from teaching and the preschool was allowed to enroll new students, while prosecutors dropped the case, as nothing suspicious was seen in the preschool’s surveillance videos.
Prosecutors launced another investigation last year after more parents reported suspected sexual abuse of their children, after which Mao was indicted and detained.
The preschool was ordered to shut down in October last year.
After a public outcry because the suspect was allowed to continue teaching for a year after the first report in July 2022, the Control Yuan on Tuesday last week said it would investigate whether the Taipei City Government and the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office had handled the first report properly.
A Taipei City Government official said there were flaws in handling the case after having received the report in 2022, for which the city’s Department of Education and the Department of Social Welfare would be held accountable, and that the city government would turn the case over to the Control Yuan for investigation.
The administrative negligence of the two departments would be filed with the performance review committee for administrative punishment, they said.
The official said the city government has reviewed five main problems in handling the initial report, which were poor communication between departments, lack of a cooperative mechanism between departments, the education department’s failure to suspend the suspect from his job immediately, poor supervision of the preschool, and investigative personnel lacking knowledge and sensitivity to such cases.
The city government concluded that “the departments’ attitude was not proactive enough,” they said.
The official said the city government would also propose 10 steps to improve the handling of such cases, including the immediate suspension or dismissal of a suspect upon receiving allegations of sexual assault, the establishment of an emergency response task force, setting up a three-level notification operation procedure and a multi-level gatekeeping mechanism, expanding checks of preschool and childcare center workers’ criminal records, and setting up a precautionary supervision mechanism for preschools involved in sexual abuse incidents.
Other steps include establishing a platform to publicize a suspected child sexual abuse incident, allocating a budget to hire more investigative personnel and enhance investigative efficiency, broaden preschool teachers’ and department officials’ knowledge about preventing sexual abuse, setting up a specialized service for accompanying the victims, and suggesting that the central government amend laws to increase punishment, they said.
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