Founder of Moving Masculinity, Esther Amarh, has called for sanctions against all officials who failed to act on allegations of sexual abuse involving female students of Obuasi Senior High Technical School.
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 Senior High Technical School headmaster, Zakaria Abdulai, months before his suspension.
She says accountability must extend beyond the suspended headmaster, Zakaria Abdulai, to every institution and official who received complaints but failed to take appropriate action to protect the students.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Middaynews on Thursday, October 15, Ms Amarh called for an audit to establish which officials and institutions failed to act on the complaints, insisting that those found culpable must face consequences.
“There must be consequences, not just to what the teacher or the individual did. There must be consequences to inaction. There must be an audit done of exactly who did not do what,” she said.
She warned that without accountability for officials who ignore reports of abuse, similar incidents would continue to occur in schools.
Ms Amarh said officials who failed to perform their duties should face measures that could affect their salaries and promotion prospects.
“If you’re given tasks and you fail to do them, there are consequences to your failure to do what you have been asked to do,” she added.
She argued that such sanctions must be strong enough to deter others from neglecting their responsibilities, adding that appeals to morality and conscience alone had not been sufficient to address the problem.
Ms Amarh described the case as evidence of a systemic failure to protect children in schools, arguing that authorities only responded when the allegations attracted public attention.
“As a nation, we should be collectively outraged by this ongoing systemic failure to protect girls, children, and boys. This sexual abuse often happens to boys as well. The only tool that these authorities paid attention to was national shame and exposure. Not conscience, not morality, not the right of those girls to have an education, and not their own structures and systems,” she said.
Ms Amarh said her experience working on issues relating to sexual abuse over the past seven to nine years had shown a recurring pattern in which students reported abuse but received little or no response from authorities.
“It is exactly the same scenario: a girl reports, inaction, silence, no action. It escalates, more girls, more lives ruined, more education interrupted,” she said.
She urged the country to treat sexual abuse in schools as a national public health crisis rather than isolated incidents affecting individual students.