When the Safe Place Becomes the Hunting Ground

Sexual abuse in Ghana's schools, the institutional silence that shelters it, and the price paid by those who speak

By Dr Ama Dake

On the 19th of October 2026, I watched a video I wish I could unsee. In it, girls at Obuasi Senior High Technical School described what they say happened to them inside the headmaster's bungalow. As I write, the number of students who have come forward with allegations against the suspended headmaster stands at 19, according to JoyNews investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni, and he says more may follow because some did not file reports. The allegations are still under investigation, and the headmaster has not been convicted of anything. But sit with this question for a moment, because I cannot shake it:

What happens when protection turns into perversion?

Parents hand their daughters to the school. The state hands them to the headmaster. A child is told, "This is the person who will keep you safe." And then the child learns that the person she was told to trust is the one she must fear. The law has an old phrase for this arrangement, in loco parentis: the school stands in the place of the parent. It is a phrase that describes trust before it describes authority. What, then, is the moral status of an institution that invites a child's trust and fails to honour it? Researchers who study what they call institutional betrayal, notably Carly Smith and Jennifer Freyd, argue that the harm done when an institution fails to prevent or properly respond to abuse is not incidental to the original injury. It compounds it.

This article argues that sexual abuse in schools is not best understood as a procession of individual monsters. It is better understood as a problem of institutions: of what they notice, what they excuse, and whom they choose to protect. Three questions run through what follows. Who is a school's silence for? What does a system reveal about its values by the people it punishes? And if the remedies are known, why are they not applied?

The school that was my safe place

Before going further, I must disclose a tension that has followed me for years. Researchers call this declaring one's positionality. I call it honesty. Every time I hear of a teacher or headmaster abusing a girl, I struggle to reconcile the news with my own story.

I walked through Mawuli Primary and JHS, then Mawuko Girls, then Ho Technical University. Those were the most vulnerable years of my life, and not one of my teachers ever touched me in a way I should fear. Ms Hosunu and Mr Nukpeza at primary school, my JHS headmaster Mr Denakpor, Mr Kwame and Mr Asase at SHS, and Mr Amegatsi Viglo at HTU. They told me I was intelligent. They challenged me. Some of them supported me with their own money. They taught me to dream, and I am eternally grateful.

Once, a friend insisted that with my looks, most teachers would have tried something. I remember asking myself a question that haunts me still: should they? The question exposes an assumption buried in much of our thinking: that a girl's safety depends on how little she attracts, rather than on how well an adult restrains himself. Why do we ask what a child did to invite harm, and so rarely ask what a system did to prevent it?

I will not pretend I have never been abused. I have, and that story is for another day. But school was my refuge, the one place that told me I was worth something.

That is why I weep. For thousands of Ghanaian children, the classroom has become the place they dread. The very walls that sheltered me have become, for them, a trap. My safety was an accident of the teachers I happened to meet. Can a nation build its children's futures on accidents?

What the numbers say

Let us look at the record, because feelings can be dismissed but figures are harder to wave away. One caution first. Criminologists speak of the dark figure of crime, the large remainder that never reaches an official record. Sexual abuse is among the offences where that remainder is largest. Every number below should therefore be read as a floor, not a ceiling.

A JoyNews Research review tracked at least 44 cases of teachers and school heads accused of sexually abusing students between January 2015 and 14 October 2026, involving at least 53 teachers. Between 2019 and 2024, there were three or fewer such cases a year. In 2025, the count doubled to six, and 2026 had already recorded four by mid-October. School heads, once a rare name on the list, are now behind about four in every ten new cases.

Now look at what happened to the accused. Only 12 of the 44 cases ended in a criminal conviction, and eight ended in dismissal by the Ghana Education Service (GES). More than half, 23 cases, have no reported verdict or final sanction. Eleven of the 12 convictions involved basic school pupils. No head of a senior high school has ever been convicted. Read together, these figures describe a funnel. An allegation becomes a complaint, a complaint becomes an investigation, an investigation becomes a charge, and a charge becomes a conviction, and at every stage the opening narrows. Of 44 tracked cases, 12 reached the end. Why does the law appear able to reach the teacher of a basic school pupil but not, in this record, the headmaster of a senior high school student? Is it because the older the child, the weaker the case, or because the higher the rank of the accused, the weaker the system?

Remember also that these are only the cases that surfaced. Five of the six senior high school cases of 2025 and 2026 came to light through a phone video, a brave student, or a journalist. They did not come from a system that works. They came in spite of one. And this counts only the school system. It leaves out the abuse that happens at home, which deserves its own conversation. I have yet to meet a woman who has not been sexually harassed or abused in some form. A structure that depends on the bravery of children is not a safeguarding system. It is a lottery, and the girl without a phone, a journalist or a witness holds a losing ticket.

The wider picture is just as troubling. A study using Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection data on 522 children aged 8 to 17 found that 23.9% had experienced sexual abuse, and adults were the main perpetrators. ActionAid figures cited in the Ghanaian Times suggest nearly a quarter of girls in Ghanaian schools have reported some form of sexual abuse during their education. Notice, too, what the first finding does to a comforting assumption. If adults were the main perpetrators, then the danger to a child is rarely the stranger at the gate. It is more often the person already inside it.

Secondary school: what reached the police, and what reached the internet

In Ghana today, justice for a schoolgirl often depends on whether somebody had a phone and the courage to press record. Consider the recent record. Read the cases below not as separate scandals but as a pattern, and ask of each one three things: who knew, when did they know, and what did they do?

Obuasi SHTS (Ashanti Region, 2026) - A JoyNews documentary, Inside the Dreaded Headmaster's Bungalow, put the alleged abuse in front of the nation. The Education Minister directed the suspension of headmaster Zakaria Abdulai on 13 October and asked the CID headquarters of the Ghana Police Service to investigate. GES interdicted him the next day and said a complaint had been lodged with the police. NAGRAT's president says reports of the alleged abuse go back to 2025. Manasseh says five girls were allegedly assaulted in March, filed complaints, and were then pressured into silence, and that another alleged assault followed in June. This was also not the school's first scandal: a senior housemaster was dismissed over a similar incident in 2018.

Bole SHS (Savannah Region, June 2026) - After a video circulated online allegedly involving a teacher and a student, GES interdicted the teacher pending investigation and restated its condemnation of amorous relationships between teachers and students.

KNUST SHS (Kumasi, September 2025) - GES removed the assistant headmaster for academics after a viral video allegedly showed him fondling a female student. I found no report of a prosecution outcome.

Shama District (October 2025) - DOVVSU arrested the headmaster of Prevailing Academy over allegations that he made a 17-year-old former student pregnant and arranged an abortion. No verdict has been reported.

And while convictions are rare at the senior high level, they are possible. A teacher at Sawla SHS who raped a student in 2019 and admitted misconduct with several girls was sentenced to 15 years in 2022. In July 2026, a teacher in Akosombo got 12 years for defiling a 12-year-old pupil he taught privately. The difference between these cases and the rest is not the law. It is whether the system chose to act. What, then, explains the choosing? And who decides?

Speak, even when your voice shakes

Every one of those cases began the same way: with one person who refused to stay quiet. Silence is not neutral. It is the abuser's oldest ally. Scholars of organisations call this organisational silence: the shared, often unspoken agreement that certain truths are too costly to say aloud. In a school, the cost is calculated daily. A student weighs her grades, a teacher weighs his posting, a parent weighs the family's standing. Who profits from each of those calculations?

"Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."Elie Wiesel

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."Maya Angelou

In Ghana, Dr Angela Dwamena-Aboagye of the Ark Foundation has warned that society's laughter silences victims, and has described the national response to survivors as broken. NAGRAT president Jacob Anaba, speaking about the Obuasi case, said the headmaster should leave immediately and added that Ghana belongs to all of us and we must protect it.

To the student reading this: what happened to you is not your fault, and it is not your shame. To the teacher who knows: your silence is a signature on someone else's pain. To the parent: believe your child the first time.

But a safeguarding system cannot be built on individual courage. Courage is what we ask of people when institutions have failed to do their job. What would it take for speaking up to become safe, rather than heroic?

How we enable offenders and punish the brave

Here is the part that should make every Ghanaian uncomfortable. We not only fail to stop abusers. We build a society around them. Abuse persists wherever the cost of exposure exceeds the cost of concealment. As you read what follows, ask how Ghana has priced the two.

We joke about it - Online, in comment sections, some voices openly treat the sexual abuse of schoolgirls as a "motivation allowance" for poorly paid teachers. They laugh. They defend it. They know that, most of the time, nothing will happen. Poverty of salary is a reason to demand better pay. It has never been a licence to rape a child.

We transfer instead of prosecute - A teacher accused of abuse is quietly moved to another school, where a new set of children becomes his new set of victims. RISE-Ghana has warned that transferring alleged perpetrators alone is not accountability. After a GES committee looked into the August 2026 riot at Obuasi SHTS, GES recommended that the headmaster and other staff involved be reposted to other schools. That recommendation only became public after the documentary aired. The literature from the United States has a blunt name for the practice: "passing the trash."

We protect the powerful - Manasseh Azure Awuni has claimed that the suspended headmaster is a constituency secretary of the ruling NDC in Juaben who was preparing to run for constituency chairman, and that he appeared to enjoy protection from people in high places. These are claims, not findings, and the party earlier told him to withdraw from the race or face disqualification but has reversed its decision, allowing him to compete. But the very fact that people in the Obuasi community, including party members, reportedly knew and said nothing tells you how this works.

We punish those who speak - According to NAGRAT's president, 38 teachers at Obuasi SHTS were asked to leave the school after speaking against the headmaster. He says the instruction followed a fact-finding committee chaired by the district director of education. Manasseh puts it more bluntly: a committee set up to look into the abuse allegations instead targeted the teachers who stood up for the girls. These claims are being made by a union leader and a journalist and have not been tested in court. GES's own August report said the sexual abuse allegations were not substantiated at that inquiry, and it criticised how some students' accounts were recorded and circulated. Whatever the full truth, the pattern should alarm us: the people who raised the alarm are the ones facing consequences, while the accused was reportedly about to be transferred.

Imagine being 16, summoning the courage to tell an adult, and then watching the teachers who believed you being pushed out of the school. What lesson does that teach every other child? Do not speak. It will cost you and the people who help you.

Consider, too, a deeper question. When an inquiry set up to protect children appears to end by protecting the institution, whom was it really built to serve?

What Ghana's law says

Ghana does not lack laws so much as the will to use them. Law has two functions: to punish, and to declare what a society will not tolerate. Which of these is Ghana's law performing today?

Defilement (Criminal Offences Act, 1960, Act 29, section 101) - Any sexual intercourse with a child under 16 is defilement, with or without the child's consent. Police commanders have told teachers publicly that the penalty runs from seven to 25 years in prison.
Indecent assault (section 103 of Act 29) covers sexual contact without consent. Civil society lawyers have also argued that teachers who abuse their influence over students can be prosecuted under the Domestic Violence Act, 2007 (Act 732).
The Children's Act, 1998 (Act 560) treats everyone under 18 as a child and places a duty on the state and on adults to protect them.
The Whistleblower Act, 2006 (Act 720) is meant to shield people who report wrongdoing in good faith from victimisation. The 38 teachers deserve to know whether it protects them.

There is also a dangerous gap. Because the age of consent is 16, commentators warn that students aged 16 to 18 are left exposed to educators who exploit their authority, and that this is why Ghana must criminalise sexual relationships between teachers and students. An 18-year-old girl whose headmaster controls her grades, her housing, and her future is not truly free to say no. Where does consent end and coercion begin when one party holds the other's future in his hands? The age threshold treats consent as a number. Lived experience treats it as a relationship. Should the law of a country in which a headmaster can be the gatekeeper of a girl's future treat his "yes" and her "yes" as the words of equals?

What the world has learned

Other countries have faced this exact crisis and built systems. We do not have to invent everything from scratch. No such system is perfect, and none can simply be transplanted. Comparison is useful less for what it prescribes than for what it reveals.

England: Keeping Children Safe in Education - This statutory guidance, which schools must follow, sets out safer recruitment, mandatory checks through the Disclosure and Barring Service (including a barred list of people banned from working with children), and a dedicated section on how to handle allegations against staff.
Australia: Working With Children Checks and Child Safe Standards - In states such as New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, anyone working with children must hold a check. Checks are continuously monitored; a barred person must be removed from employment, and all states now recognise each other's negative decisions, so a banned person cannot simply cross a border. New South Wales has also given its Children's Guardian the power to enforce child-safe standards in schools.
Common threads - a national register of teachers who have been found guilty or barred; independent reporting channels not controlled by the school head; mandatory reporting duties for staff; and legal protection for those who report.

Comparison also calls for humility. Registers, background checks and independent regulators presuppose reliable records, enforcement bodies that are not captured, and courts able to hear cases promptly. Which of these can Ghana build now, and which must be built first?

What must be done to mend a broken system?

Reform is easy to list and hard to deliver. Each of the nine measures below answers a failure documented above, and none will succeed alone. Together they would invert the present incentives, so that silence becomes costly and speaking becomes safe.

Stop the quiet transfers - Any teacher credibly accused of sexual misconduct should be suspended and reported to the police, never moved to another school.
Make reporting to the police mandatory for every head and GES officer who learns of an allegation, with sanctions for failing to do so.
Protect whistleblowers - The 38 Obuasi teachers should be reinstated or protected while their claims are investigated. Anyone retaliating against a person who reports abuse should face discipline.
Create an independent complaints channel, staffed outside the school and the district office, that students can reach confidentially.
Build a national register of offenders so a dismissed or convicted teacher cannot be rehired anywhere in the country.
Close the legal gap by criminalising sexual relationships between teachers and students, whatever the student's age.
Speed up trials - A conviction rate of 12 in 44 tracked cases is not justice. Prosecutors, DOVVSU and courts should treat school abuse as priority cases, and families must not be allowed to "settle" them out of court.
Pay and train teachers properly, and teach students and staff what abuse looks like and where to report it. We must also ask our boys, who may be suffering in silence too.
Make the process transparent - Publish annual national statistics on school sexual abuse, including reports, arrests, convictions and sanctions.

A closing word

I was lucky. My teachers made me dream. But luck should never be the thing that keeps a child safe at school.

Behind every number in this article is a child who stopped raising her hand in class, who dreaded the evening bell, who carried a secret too heavy for her age. Their pain should not be what finally wakes us up. It should be what moves us to act.

I would rather end with questions than with a verdict, because each reader, whether teacher, parent, official, journalist or legislator, must answer them in their own conscience.

If a child is believed only when someone films her, what are we doing for the girl who has no phone?
Whom does our silence protect, and what does it cost the people we claim to be shielding?
Why does it fall to journalists, unions and viral videos to do what the police, the courts and the Ghana Education Service exist to do?
When a school removes the teachers who spoke up, whom does it consider its client: the child, or the institution?
If boys, too, are abused and silenced, why does our national conversation leave so little room for them?
What would a Ghana look like in which a 16-year-old's first report is believed, and what are we willing to give up (our jokes, our party loyalties, our deference to rank) to build it?

Speak. Believe. Report. Protect those who do. And let us never again laugh.

Note: Allegations described in this article, including those involving the Obuasi SHTS headmaster, are unproven. No court has convicted him, and investigations by the Ghana Police Service are ongoing. Figures are drawn from JoyNews Research, GES statements, and news reports published up to 20 October 2026.