Avril Griffith is angry! Her 11-year-old daughter was lured out of McAuley’s Primary School in St Catherine and raped last Tuesday.

She is angry at that.

But she is more angry that it is the third incident of rape at the school this year and that parents were not warned.

She is also angry at the obviously lax security at the school.

She is angry, too, at the school’s principal, Jerrey Banton, for failing to report the previous incidents to his superiors at the education ministry.

She accused Banton of attempting a cover-up.

“He has been calling me to see how we can settle this one before the media gets it,” Griffith told the Observer in an interview on Friday. “Because of what happened, the little girl is so traumatised and I can’t sleep at night.”

It was Inspector Duetrass Foster-Gardener, the head of the Rape Unit of the Spanish Town Police who confirmed that it was the third incident of rape involving children at McAuley’s Primary, which is located at Duncan’s Pen, a short walk from the Spanish Town Highway.

The first, according to Foster-Gardener, was in January and the second in June.

“This appears to be the only school being targeted,” she said.

In fact, Foster-Gardener confirmed to Griffith that she had advised the school to warn students and parents about the previous rapes, warn children to be careful and to explain to them safety procedures.

On Friday, Banton defended his decision for not taking any such action and for failing to inform the education ministry’s regional office, that covers St Catherine, of the incidents, because he did not have “substantial information”.

“We were not able to convince ourselves that what we were hearing was 100 per cent credible,” Banton told the Observer.

Simon McKenzie, who heads the education ministry’s Region Six office, said that he has asked for a full report on the matter from the principal, after which he will send an education officer “to do the follow-up”.

“But this is a police case so there is not much more we can do right now,” McKenzie said. “All we can do is recommend (safety) measures to the principal.”

The education ministry official’s major concern appeared to be that the school had not implemented a policy that prevents children from leaving school premises during school hours without written permission.

McKenzie suggested, too, that the parents in the earlier incidents did not come forward with complaints, but Foster-Gardener insisted that those matters had been pressed.

“In the case of the other two children, a man was taken into custody, but the complainants failed to identify him,” she said.

All three cases followed a similar series of events, involving a man who the victims described as having several teeth missing from his mouth, Foster-Gardener said.

The one with Avril Griffith’s daughter began shortly before midday on Tuesday. According to the police report, two men approached a teacher at the door of her classroom and asked if they could sell grapes at the school. During the discussion, the teacher sent the child to collect information from an adjoining classroom.

One of the men apparently trailed the child and told her that the teacher wanted her to follow him to the gate for grapes. The child complied, but when she saw no grapes and began asking about them, she was threatened.

She was taken to a nearby bus stop, where the two men took her on a bus to Rockfort where she was sexually assaulted at a bushy, vacant lot. The child was later put back on a bus to find her way home.

She did not return home until after 6:00 pm.

At school, when the child had not returned to her classroom after 1:00 pm, teachers launched a search and called her parents, who reported the matter to the police. A doctor confirmed that she had been raped and that she had cuts and bruises on her body.

Griffith was livid that when she turned up at the school the following day, there was no security at the gate and vendors told her that it was the third rape for the year. Griffith told the Observer that when she went to the school on Tuesday afternoon, their was no watchman at the gate. Someone there told her he was in Old Harbour. “We heard he (the security guard) was at his house sleeping,” Griffith said.

McAuley’s principal, Banton, said he was “extremely shaken” by what transpired on Tuesday. He described the attacks as “just a new phenomenon we are dealing with”.

Tomorrow, Foster-Gardener will address children at the school about safety issues. She also has a message to parents: “Tell your children not to go anywhere with strangers, that it’s best to walk in groups and do not talk to suspicious characters.”

She also wants people to report incidents where children are being attacked on the street or who appear to be uncomfortable in the presence of older persons escorting them.

In the meantime, the 11 year-old has been transferred from McAuley’s Primary to another school in St Catherine and is undergoing professional counselling.