The Price Of Silence

True to expectations, the ACS Board of Governors comprising the panel investigating former school principal Dr Ong Teck Chin is closing ranks and will not be making public the much anticipated findings of their report. They merely stated that "The report reinforces the original allegations." Their statement also said some of those interviewed are teachers who are still at ACS, "and would avoid Dr Ong when he was still in school," providing the tantalising nugget that there could be more than one victim in the target rich environment of the boys' school at Dover Road.

Surely a revelation like that will generate a firestorm, outscaling the conflagrations of the Sumatra agricultural practices. Given the recent plethora of lurid headlines, which should sell lots of newspapers, imagination can only run riot with the plausible permutations of sexual impropriety.

One end of the spectrum has an ex-banker charged for insulting the modesty of a woman. One of the offences, which is documented as asking his female companion whether she was a virgin during a drive to Keppel Club, carries a potential jail term of up to one year. His string of credentials challenge that of Dr Ong's - Vice-President of volunteer organisation Pertapis, chair of the Pertapis Centre for Women and Girls, and founder of Ikhlas Catering, a catering setup staffed by former offenders and single mothers. Sounds like he had a target rich environment too, albeit of the female species. Plus, he was on the select 11-member Primary Education Review and Implementation Committee set up up in 2008, under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, no doubt.

The other extemity has an ex-hotel General Manager spiking the drink of a job seeker with Zolpidem and accessing her room uninvited. For causing the woman to take poison [the Zolpidem sleeping drug for insomnia is classified under the Poisons Act and is available only through prescription] to facilitate an offence [the G-rated report mentions only kissing], the ex-GM can be jailed for 10 years, and fined, or caned.

A few years ago, Dr Ong presided over a public caning, under closed doors of course, of errant school boys, including the victim of a bullying session in the boarding school dormitory who unfortunately chose to defend himself from bodily harm with a chair. The desperate local MSM offered a free Nokia handphone to any student willing to share snippets of the indoor proceedings. They will definitely have to up the ante if they expect to get anything out of the ACS Board. Perhaps a fancy sports job like those preferred by Singapore Land Authority (SLA) officers might loosen lips a little.