moral dilemma

one of our lecturers shared with us in class today this real life moral dilemma she faced several years ago while teaching at an all-girls secondary school. One day, she was suddenly approached by one of the girls' mother and told that the latter wanted to withdraw her daughter from the school. It turned out that this 15-year old-girl was actually already 7 months pregnant at that time! And the worse thing was, the "father" of the baby was actually her own stepfather! This was one of those typical all-girls' school where the girls wore pinafores and could hide their figures quite well as long as they did not wear their belts - which would be familiar to you if you came from such a school yourself - i did. in my lecturer's own words: "you can't tell who is pregnant and who is not".

with all the intuitive instincts of her psychology background, my lecturer figured that what really happened was the girl, since she was so young, had probably been raped by her stepfather. Her mother, in order to protect her husband and to hide the shame to the family, was now withdrawing the daughter from the school and was trying to keep everything hush-hush. In fact, the family had already decided to bring up the child as if it was the girl's brother and to keep the secret forever from the child. According to my lecturer, she found herself struggling with whether to report the case and finally decided not to, after pressure from all sides (even the girl herself was willing to hide the truth of what happened). What was most painful was that even the Principal of the school said that "nothing could be done" since everyone was willing to "cover up" on what really happened..

in retrospect, she is no longer sure if she had made the right decision after all. in some ways, she even felt like an "accomplice" to a misdeed..

is the responsibility of the teacher first and foremost to protect and nurture the child, above all else? what could have been done otherwise? umm... difficult situation, huh?