Executive Director of the ARK Foundation, Angela Dwamena-Aboagye, has expressed concern over repeated reports of sexual abuse in Ghanaian secondary schools, saying the failure to address such cases points to serious weaknesses in the country’s systems for protecting children.
She has called for a thorough investigation into the sexual assault allegations involving the headmaster of Obuasi Senior High Technical School (SHTS), insisting that everyone who may have helped to conceal the alleged abuse must be identified and held accountable.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Monday, October 19, during a discussion on the Obuasi SHTS case, Ms Dwamena-Aboagye questioned how sexual abuse in schools had been allowed to persist despite previous reports and investigations.
When asked how the country had allowed abuse in secondary schools to become almost normalised, she said the repeated cases should prompt serious questions about the effectiveness of existing child protection systems.
“It shouldn’t be a shock, but if you keep hearing these things happening over and over again, you know that we are operating in a system that has no system or a very, very broken system,” she said.
She said that the allegations were not an isolated incident, pointing to previous media investigations and reports of abuse involving female students in other secondary schools.
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“Joy FM, you have done other investigations; other reports came out of females in other secondary schools and what had happened. What has happened to all those cases?” she asked.
According to her, the recurrence of such cases raises concerns about whether the authorities have learnt from previous incidents and taken effective steps to prevent similar abuses.
Ms Dwamena-Aboagye said the situation reflected a wider societal problem in which the experiences of children, particularly girls who report sexual abuse, were often overlooked.
She described this as the invisibility of sexual violence in society and the justice system, arguing that the concerns of children were frequently ignored by adults who should be protecting them.
“It just tells me something about our mindset. I won’t even say culture or mindset. It will be part of modernity and culture combined,” she said.
She added that the failure to take allegations seriously could leave victims without justice and allow abuse to continue.
The ARK Foundation executive director, however, stressed that the accused must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
“This is a case where, if the allegations are proved, and yes, we all know that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty and we need to remind ourselves of that,” she said.
Despite this legal principle, she urged the authorities to treat the allegations with the seriousness they deserved and investigate the circumstances surrounding the case.
She said the country needed to move beyond expressions of concern and take concrete steps to ensure that sexual abuse was not tolerated in schools.
Ms Dwamena-Aboagye called for everyone who may have enabled or concealed the alleged abuse to be identified and sanctioned, saying accountability should extend beyond the person accused.
“All colluders must be identified and sanctioned at every level,” she said.
She said that ending impunity was essential to preventing further cases of sexual violence and ensuring that those responsible could not rely on their positions or connections to escape accountability.
“The first thing is that impunity must end. We must let people understand you can’t bring our mindset of invisibility of sexual violence into a case that is happening live. We need to act,” she said.
The ARK Foundation executive director said the Department of Social Welfare should have identified the alleged victims, including those who might have returned to their home communities, and ensured they received psychosocial support.
“By now, I should hear that the Social Welfare Department in the district has already moved into the school, found all those girls, those that have even gone to their villages, and they’ve been put in a system where they can get psychosocial help,” she said.
She said that the parents of the girls were also likely to be traumatised and needed assistance to navigate the situation.
According to her, some parents felt neglected because they lacked the financial resources to seek help or pursue their concerns effectively.
“Somebody needs to reach out to them for help,” she said.
Ms Dwamena-Aboagye said the allegations raised questions about the application of Ghana’s laws on criminal offences, domestic violence and child protection.
She said that the circumstances of the case required the relevant authorities to examine possible breaches of the Criminal Offences Act, the Domestic Violence Act and the Children’s Act.
“There are several infractions of the laws that we have in this country all at once,” she said.
She also raised concerns about the responsibilities of adults entrusted with the care of children, particularly in residential school settings, and the need to protect students from violence and endangerment.
She said the recurrence of such allegations, despite existing legal protections, should be a source of concern for the country.
“We have sat down for this to happen over and over again. And I think as a country, we must be ashamed,” she said.
“GES has a lot to answer for,” she added.
Ms Dwamena-Aboagye also cautioned against attempts to turn the Obuasi SHTS allegations into a political dispute between the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).
She said comparing the number of sexual assault cases reported under different administrations would distract from the need to investigate the allegations and protect children.
“Anybody turns this into an NPP-NDC issue to start counting how many cases of sexual assaults happened in this regime and happened in that regime,” she said.
She said alleged wrongdoing should not be attributed to an entire political party simply because some members might be implicated.
“Even if some people are protecting the man, I don’t think it’s a whole party,” she said.
She urged political parties to identify and sanction any members found to have colluded to protect the accused, insisting that political affiliations should not prevent accountability.
“You cannot, as adults, be protecting an adult who has care over people in the name of any political connection,” she said.
Her comments follow a JoyNews investigation by Manasseh Azure Awuni, which revealed that municipal authorities, education officials and other influential figures had received reports concerning alleged sexual abuse by the Obuasi SHTS headmaster months before his suspension.