Prosecutors recently indicted a former elementary-school swimming coach for sexually abusing four minors in a case from 19 years ago.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said it has completed the investigation into a swim coach from an elementary school in northern Taiwan.
Last year, a livestreamer spoke out on social media and in public about being sexually molested by a swimming coach at her elementary school.
Photo: CNA
It later emerged that another woman had reported a similar incident to the school in 2023, which reported the coach through the school safety system for sexual assault.
School officials discovered that the livestreamer’s account matched the location and the circumstances of the earlier report.
It then contacted the livestreamer for more information, uncovering two more alleged victims to bring the total to four.
The school immediately forwarded evidence to prosecutors for investigation.
Prosecutors confirmed that the two accounts described the same perpetrator, location and type of abuse, and confirmed in an investigation that the two women did not know each other.
The two girls’ parents had also previously complained to the school about the coach, they found.
The prosecutors therefore did not believe the coach’s denial or his claim that they could not have occurred, as lifeguards were always present.
They also rejected his polygraph conducted by a private company.
The women said that the coach used his position to molest them, asking them to stay behind after swim class under the guise of correcting their stroke.
He would then ask them to stand by the poolside to practice their arm formation while standing behind them and rubbing his genitals against their behinds, they said.
They said that their parents were too afraid to speak out at the time, and only complained to the school after their children had graduated.
The coach was dismissed not long afterward.
As school safety reporting mechanisms were not yet established, he was reportedly able to continue teaching at other schools.
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