Police together with National Children Authority and Ministry of Education have identified the school whose infant learners were filmed by a teacher doing a sexual act.
The school is identified as Vision Academy Nursery and Primary located in Muduuma Sub County, Mpigi district.
By the time police reached at the school, all teachers had run away, leaving behind only the security guard and school bursar with about ten pupils, including the two victims aged between 5-10 years who appeared in widely shared video.
The school has only five classes teaching up to primary three. The teacher behind the filming is identified as Juliet.
Gerald Katongole, the Mpigi district inspector of school, indicates that the said institution opened up by someone only identified as Mulagira and is not registered by the education ministry.
“The school is illegally operating,” Katongole said during a telephone interview. “I had never heard of it and we cannot not even tell whether those who were teaching these children are really trained teachers.”
The issue at hand came to light when Humphrey Tumwesigye, a concerned citizen and parent, wrote to the Uganda National Teachers Union-UNATU seeking reprimand for adults, believed to be teachers, behind the filming of two pupils engaging in sexual acts.
The video depicts two pupils—a boy and a girl—responding to an adult female’s requests to replicate what she had observed them doing.
The female adult in the video was also wielding a stick giving signals that if they didn’t follow her instructions she was going to cane them.
“Repeat and do what you were doing exactly,” a female voice is heard ordering the pupils, who at first showed hesitation but subsequently, out of fear, accepted the instructions and so re-acted the sexual actions that they had been performing.
Filbert Baguma, the UNATU Secretary General to whom the initial complaint was sent, says that if indeed those who filmed the pupils are teachers, they need serious re-tooling on how to handle and deal with children.
Martin Kasagara Kiiza, the Executive Director National Children Authority-NCA, notes that beside the teachers’ code of conduct, many laws in Uganda bars individuals from exploiting children.
“You cannot record and share pictures or videos of minors like that, it is not allowed in the law; the Children (Amendment) Act of 2016 outlaws this as a form of child exploitation,”
Kiiza said, adding that of late many individuals have been seen recording and later sharing videos including children which he says should be stopped before the long arm of the law catches up with them.
Besides the Children (Amendment) Act quoted by Kasagara, the Computer Misuse act also prohibits distribution of material that depicts a child engaged in sexually suggestive or explicit conduct.
A new Amendment of the same act signed by the president yesterday also bars unauthorized access to data, and prohibits the sharing of data relating to children without authorization from their parents or guardians.
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