A Toronto private school was sued over a student’s alleged sexual assault. The school’s name was kept secret until now.
“The legal action was brought in the Supreme Court of Canada against the principal of this school, in the name of the school itself,” says the school’s lawyer, Peter Brault, who has a client in the case.
In the early days of the Toronto school, Brault says he had “never heard of any incident” that might have prompted the school’s lawyers to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
The school, by the way, is called NAPE Toronto, or The North American Preparatory School. They opened in September, 2008.
In November, 2008, a student came to the school, not from any of the surrounding high school, but from a community near Toronto where she had attended kindergarten.
She was 13. She had been sexually assaulted and a teacher had known about the assaults but had not said anything to the girl’s parents and administrators, let alone to the school. The student said she had been raped.
Brault says the girl and her parents decided to come to NAPE and the school accepted her as one of its students, without any further investigation.
“After that, the next meeting we had with the school was at an interview where the girl and her parents were confronted with the fact that they were not given any information about the nature of the assault and that it must have been the responsibility of the staff members to keep it to themselves,” Brault says.
The girl and her parents “were very upset and she was told that she would not be able to live in the same house with the staff members if she had decided to speak out,” Brault says.
They also told the school that they decided to go to the police and then to the Human Rights Tribunal.
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