The Ministry of Education (MOE) yesterday passed a revision to a law aimed at handing out stricter punishment for wilful concealment of sexual harassment or assault on campus.
Teachers guilty of such actions will face dismissal and fines if such behavior is not reported within 24 hours, according to the proposed revision.
Although the Gender Equity Education Act (性別平等教育法) stipulated that teaching staff were responsible for reporting such actions, it made no time provisions and did not impose any fines, Deputy Minister of Education Wu Tsai-shung (吳財順) said.
The revision states that reports must be filed within 24 hours or, depending on the circumstances of delay, staff would face fines of between NT$30,000 to NT$150,000.
“Teaching staff willfully concealing such acts, destroying, altering, or falsifying evidence will be punished by dismissal or removal from their post,” Wu said.
In light of several recent cases of students harassing teachers, Wu said that if one party of the sexual assault or harassment is a student, according to the Gender Equity Education Act, it should be reported.
The ministry hoped to pass the draft law to the Executive Yuan, then on to the Legislative Yuan in order to speedily pass it, he added.
In related news, allegations that a male recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award in an unnamed junior high school in New Taipei City had previously been accused of sexually harassing a female student have been confirmed as true.
The New Taipei City government agreed to the school’s dismissal of the teacher, and retracted his award.
The ministry said the New Taipei City Education Bureau should list the teacher as unfit for teaching.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater