Something doesn’t ring true about this story from Edmonton;
An Edmonton elementary school has a new policy on washroom breaks and has revised an old policy on recess.
This, after a Grade Two student was sexually assaulted in the girls bathroom during morning recess yesterday by a man hiding in a stall.
Officials at the Oliver School are ordering all students to go to the bathroom in pairs.
[…]
Carlson says it appears the girl was groped and that her only physical injury is a bump on the head.
It doesn’t ring true because of the location and the extreme degree of risk. A school washroom is a trap in more ways than one – they’re not only single exit rooms, they’re single exit rooms inside a building with hundreds of potential witnesses. Help is only feet away. And, while there’s a high likelihood of finding a victim in his preferred age range, there’s low likelihood of finding one a lone, vulnerable one. Girls tend to travel in pairs or packs, and the appearance of a male in a girls washroom would elicit instant alarm – shrieks – from little girls. Anyone as familiar with the habits of young children as a pedophile brazen enough to grab a girl in broad daylight should know all of these things.
The girl was attacked around 10:15 a.m. Monday as she stopped to use the washroom on the way out to the playground during morning recess at Oliver School, just west of Edmonton’s downtown.
“An unknown male approached her from one of the stalls in the girls’ bathroom, dragged her into the stall and sexually assaulted her,” police spokesman Jeff Wuite said.
The school, which houses students from kindergarten to Grade 9, was locked down for about two hours after the incident while police confirmed the suspect was no longer on the premises.
The reports I’ve heard indicate the only witness was the child herself. Unless the alleged molester was very young and “new” to the game, or of diminished mental capacity, the high-risk behavior described in this story doesn’t make a lot of sense.
