Naturena parents shut down outside primary school over Grade 4 boys' abuse claims, demand principal goes

Parents and community leaders gathered outside a primary school in Naturena, south of Johannesburg, to demand the removal of the principal after a group of Grade 4 boys alleged they were sexually assaulted by older Grade 7 pupils, reportedly in the school toilets.

As eNCA reported on 26 October, the allegations have drawn a Gauteng Education Department visit to the school and a trauma counselling unit has been deployed on site.

Department spokesperson Onwabile Lubhelwana said the department is concerned about the incident, and confirmed that police are in the process of opening two cases.

The protest is the community’s answer to a question that parents across the country ask every time a school is named in an abuse allegation: who was watching, and why did children have to speak before anything moved.

For the families at the gate in Naturena, the demand is concrete. They want the principal out. They have not accepted a counselling deployment as a substitute for accountability, and the presence of officials at the school has not dispersed them.

The two cases now being registered will determine what the state can actually establish. Until those dockets are opened and investigated, the allegations remain allegations, and no person has been charged or convicted. The boys who spoke are Grade 4 learners, which places them at the youngest end of the school and raises the question of supervision in the passages and toilets where the assaults are said to have happened.

Gauteng Education’s trauma unit is the immediate service response. What parents will be watching is whether counselling is followed by a proper account of what the school knew, when it knew it, and what it did. That is the standard schools are held to under the Children’s Act and the department’s own safety obligations, and it is the standard the community outside the gate is applying.

The department has confirmed the deployment and the pending cases. It has not, in the material available, said whether the principal has been suspended, whether an internal investigation has been opened, or what steps have been taken to separate the pupils named in the allegations from the rest of the school while police work proceeds.

Those are the questions the parents are asking, and they are the questions the department will have to answer publicly if the protest at the gate is to end.