Some teachers giving kids the NAPLAN test decided to cheat. Most adults no doubt thought, Yeah well, there’s always a few, and got on with their lives. Not so the Australian Education Union. It’s the stress, you see. Anne Crawford, the Union’s Vice-President:
“I am not saying that Correne did not do this, but in any kind of process the circumstances and the context will make a difference,” Ms Crawford said.
“This is a highly politicised matter. But this should not mean that we have a teacher hung, drawn and quartered without justice.”
Ms Crawford said Ms Woolmer had found this year’s NAPLAN testing “particularly stressful” because of the essential place it now had in assessing school performance.
As it happened, I had just been reading about Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison in which the US military humiliated, maltreated and just plain tortured some prisoners. The prison was
a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of 75 to 1 …
Mark Danner, Stripping Bare the Body, Black Inc, 2009, p. 387.
There’s more: an incompetent prison director, lack of training, vague and contradictory instructions, 12-hour shifts. But none of it staved off the sentences handed down to the military police.
There’s something odd about the way we think about mitigation. It seems there might be two straight line relationships, one between the force of external circumstances and the degree of mitigation, and a second, derived from the first, between the degree of mitigation and the gravity of the offence. But while the first might be straight, I suspect the second is not. We tend to become less convinced by mitigation as the severity of the crime increases.
External circumstances, again, even if they could be measured, act on different people in different ways. Most people didn’t cheat on the NAPLAN tests: some people did. Perhaps they are more frail than others, less able to withstand pressure. Or perhaps they are following some law they regard as higher. We don’t know.
Who’d be a judge?