Israel's Second-largest Haredi Sect Starts Teaching Boys About Sexual Abuse Awareness
The Belz Hasidic sect, the second largest Haredi community in Israel, established a school program last month to protect students at its elementary schools …
The Belz Hasidic sect, the second largest Haredi community in Israel, established a school program last month to protect students at its elementary schools for boys from sexual abuse. Parents of students from grades 1 through 6 in the community’s boys’ schools were recently sent a letter regarding the “Sviva Betucha” (safe environment) program.
The letter explained that the program “will give the students tools and practices relating to cautiousness and protecting the body and the soul,” and that the educational staff has been given professional instruction “in keeping with the Belz outlook.”
Prior to this, similar programs were only instituted in schools that are considered more marginal in the Haredi community, including girls’ schools, private elementary schools for boys and in some of the Bnei Yosef schools affiliated with the Shas party. By contrast, the Belz school system has roughly 7,000 students, and the expectation now is that other Hasidic schools could follow suit.
The program is sponsored by Yedidut Toronto, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit, for ultra-Orthodox schools. According to the organization’s website, the program has been introduced into 185 schools in about 1,100 classrooms, having trained 3,000 teachers and involving 58,000 students (about 16 percent of all of the country’s Haredi students)
Among the skills that the program is designed to teach students is “observance of rules that will help them avoid getting into situations of risk and of overstepping boundaries.” The students are also to be taught “to spot from the beginning when a boundary has been overstepped that might lead them to a risk of being harmed and how to prevent that in time.” Finally, students are taught how to respond by sharing any inappropriate conduct with people in authority.
The issue of protecting students from sexual abuse is highly sensitive in Haredi schools and in the ultra-Orthodox community in general. Rabbis and educators in the community have therefore faced a dilemma, wanting to address the issue but not knowing how. In recent years, however, there has been a dramatic change and greater openness. One source told Haaretz that this is also just one aspect of greater openness on the issue of mental health in the Haredi community in general.
The rabbis involved in the project obtained the approval in advance of the community’s spiritual leader and worked with Yedidut Toronto to adapt the program to the Belz schools’ needs. “We didn’t wait for the coming school year due to the immediate need to act on the issue before summer vacation,” a source from the community said, noting that summer vacation is a period during which such abuse is more likely to occur.
“Students have proven that when adults in a child’s environment … set
clear boundaries maintaining and respecting the sensitivities and needs
of the child through healthy communications, the child is less likely to
be in situation of risk,” the letter to Belz school parents explained.
Unlike limited instruction in the past in the country’s Haredi schools
that emphasized the need to be cautious of people from outside the
community, this program actually focuses on the students’ immediate
environment, where the risk of harm is greater.
“Statistics in Israel show that there is a higher percentage of harm to
children, boys and girls, under the age of 12,” the Yedidut Toronto
website notes. “In a large proportion of the cases, it involves an
offender from the immediate environment with which the child is
familiar. It’s important to prepare the children for situations in which
they would exercise awareness, spot behavior that is not appropriate
and report it to a person of responsibility.”
Yedidut Toronto, which works extensively with mainstream ultra-Orthodox
institutions, refused to comment for this article or to explain the
program, but the program content becomes clearer from the information on
its website. “Preventing sexual harm is based first and foremost on
teaching children basic cautionary rules, developing and normalizing
protective discourse with the child, imparting the child’s
self-confidence in his body and familiarization with the rules of ‘do’
and ‘don’t’ in personal and public space,” it states.
As the parents of the children gain greater awareness of the issue, they
may also discover that their children have been abused. The parents
also receive training and have access to counseling resources in the
event that they have a child who has been abused.
