The prefect of the Szent Antal Franciscan High School and College in Esztergom cut one of his eighth-grade students several times in the stomach. The crime of the boy living in the dormitory was that he ran around in his underpants and disturbed his classmates, whom the teacher was preparing for the chemistry competition. The prefect therefore grabbed the boy with another man, dragged him into the shower cabin, where he then repeatedly punched him in the stomach, poured water on the crouched child and left him there. The boy was finally taken out of the shower by his classmates. The principal of the school and the prefect of the dormitory spoke to the parents about the incident a few days later, who said they were not told the rougher details at first.
“Both the director and Brother Mihály himself informed us that this had happened, but we didn’t think it was that brutal. They told us that the child was messy, so they took him under their arms and took him into the shower. Since my son and the prefect have known each other for a long time, my son also defended him at first. He blamed himself for provoking the whole thing by not going to take a shower. We also thought that it was just a little he could have hit him and that’s all,” the mother of the 15-year-old boy told Telex.
The prefect, on the other hand, remembers that he communicated clearly from the beginning and informed the child’s father the day after the incident that he had made a serious mistake.
“I asked him several times to go take a shower and unfortunately I lost my self-control when he went to the blackboard and scribbled the equations twice. The beginning really started as a game: we just hold him and throw him in the shower, but then the child resisted a lot, and I was already angry because of the history, and I punched him in the stomach”
the prefect admitted the abuse to Telex.
He does not remember exactly how many times he hit the boy, because, as he said, not only the child, but also him was injured because of what happened, the whole thing was traumatic for him as well. However, he confirmed that several students watched the scene.
A parent wrote to Telex at length about the abuse in October and the harsh pedagogical methods prevailing in the college. Another student told the school psychologist about the beatings, who confirmed to us that the news of the abuse had reached him. The specialist immediately notified the high school’s child protection officer, who, based on the protocol of the institution, also entered the case in the table that the director also saw. The psychologist then requested information from the director several times and drew his attention to the reporting obligation required by law, but his superior decided in favor of an internal investigation.
Director Szánthó Gellért also wrote to Telex that an internal investigation was launched due to what happened, and “labor sanctions” were applied to the adults involved, as it was clear that a border crossing had taken place, “but we assessed the weight of this in the light of the circumstances known to us at the time, and at the same time treated it as a disciplinary matter”. The child protection report was waived because the student also saw what happened as a game rather than abuse; the child’s parents did not see the case as abuse either, and because they had not received any negative feedback regarding brother Mihály.
His way of working and his relationship with students have been characterized as youthful, direct and playful, and at the same time they are respected for standing up for them on several occasions.
– listed the director.
The school psychologist left the institution in the meantime, but he still reported in a long letter to the Provincial Headquarters that several students had reported the abuse, and also addressed the case of the eighth-grade boy separately. He requested information as to whether the notification obligation required by law had been fulfilled in the case. Since he did not receive a clear answer to his question after several exchanges of letters, he turned to the competent child welfare service, where he inquired whether they had been informed about the particular case. The child welfare service responded that they had not received a report on the matter and then contacted the police.
Pedagogical tools = humiliating punishments
Only boys study in the Franciscan high school and college in Esztergom, most of whom live inside the institution. They usually go home once a month, but their family members can visit them on weekends. After classes, life goes on in the dormitory located in the other wing of the building: in the afternoons, the children study in so-called studios (study rooms), which are supervised by prefects. Strict rules apply to everyone, and breaking them usually always results in some kind of punishment. “It is included in the pedagogical toolbox that if someone speaks badly, if he is late, he must do twenty push-ups or run two short internal school circles,” Brother Mihály explained.
The St. Anna Franciscan church and monastery, as well as the building of the St. Antal Esztergom Franciscan High School and College in downtown Esztergom, on August 9, 2024 – Photo: Zoltán Máthé / MTI
The prefect also talked about how, as a joke, they played a game for two or three weeks where, based on an application, the student who spoke during the study could be slapped a little. “Usually, however, the punishment is that extra 10-15 minutes are added to the study”, he claimed. According to him, the coarser pedagogical tools could be refined, but it often acts as a deterrent if the boys see that there are consequences for their actions. “Since children are wired for immediate stimuli, immediate rewards or sanctions can help them develop,” he said.
The boys are probably so used to the often humiliating punishments that they don’t even talk about them at home. At first, the student concerned did not tell his parents that his prefect punched him several times in the stomach. The 15-year-old boy, with a good physique, told Telex that he felt that the blows were stronger, “that’s why I got the curve. I told brother Misi, I expressed several times that this is not funny,” he said. They then discussed with their classmates that “this was an exaggeration”, and they would have settled what had happened between them.
The eighth-grade boy has verified integration, learning and behavior difficulties (BTMN), which the school knew about. However, the deeply religious parents enrolled the child in the strong boarding high school, if only because they had known brother Mihály from the Pasarét community for a long time. However, the relationship between the teacher and the child began to deteriorate, and if the prefect could not discipline the boy verbally, he resorted to harsher means. It so happened that in one of the chemistry classes he butted heads with another student because the children were talking during the class.
The boy did not want to go back to the dormitory after the Christmas break, and the prefect repeatedly informed the parents that there was a problem with the child’s behavior, also hinting that he was suspected of having ADHD. Something in the mother started to turn on when her child ran out of physical education class in March and took the train home from Esztergom after the last class.
“Then the physical education teacher put him in front of the class and he had to hold a 10-20 kilo stool over his head, because he had an argument with brother Mihály the night before. Since he couldn’t take it and dropped the drumstick after twenty minutes, he had to plank without a break. He felt so humiliated that he started to cry. Nevertheless, he had to hang on until the end of the class,” said the parent.
The Franciscan high school admitted to Telex that the teacher crossed the line in this case as well. The incident was investigated and “measures against the teacher in accordance with the internal regulations” were taken. What exactly this means was not specified. In their response, however, they emphasized that the physical educator “tried intensively to cooperate with the parents in order to properly treat the BTMN student and had very positive aspirations towards the child”.
That day, brother Mihály spoke to the student’s mother on the phone to tell her not to let her child home because he was misbehaving again, but the boy also called his parents.
“When my son called me and said, ‘Can I go home?’, I could tell in his voice that something was really wrong, but he was so disturbed that he couldn’t even tell me at first. Later, he called me back from the train and everything came out of him, including the fact that he would no longer protect brother Mihály.”
And also that the October case was much more brutal than the parents knew. He described the same abuse to his mother that his classmate also told the school psychologist about. “He told me how they started dragging him into the shower, so he grabbed the door frame. He thought they were just playing, but then he got three in the stomach. He then let go of the door because of the pain. They put him in the shower, but because he got another one in the stomach, that’s when he really started to get scared. Then they turned on the water and left him,” the woman recounted the events.
There is no crime to prosecute
Three months after the abuse, at the end of January, the police first interrogated the psychologist, and then several children, including the student whose stomach was cut, were summoned to the Esztergom Police Station as witnesses. For the first time, the boy concerned spoke about the abuse in a much more restrained manner. However, after the incident in gym class in March, the eighth-grader went to the police station again with his parents to supplement his testimony.
Principal Szánthó Gellért delivers a speech at the handover of the new school wing of the Szent Antal Esztergom Franciscan High School and College on October 4, 2024 – Photo: Zoltán Máthé / MTI
After the school found out that the boy had really experienced “his teacher’s actions” as abuse, they also notified child protection, the director wrote. The prefect acknowledged the trespass to Telex, for which he apologized to the student and accepts responsibility. “I don’t want to cover up the matter, I don’t want to refine it, embellish it, unfortunately I lost my self-control and something happened that shouldn’t have happened,” he said. He knows that there is a police procedure in the case, but he has not been questioned yet and probably will not be.
The Esztergom Police Department initiated criminal proceedings against an unknown perpetrator for minor bodily harm. “However, based on the evidence obtained so far, no suspicion of the commission of a crime to be prosecuted has arisen,” the press department of the Komárom-Esztergom County Police Headquarters announced. This means that the police cannot practically do anything ex officio, because no medical examination was made of the blows, and thus it cannot be proven that the injury would have been healing for more than eight days, i.e. no serious crime took place. Since the parents did not make a private initiative, the investigation will probably be closed soon.
In his answer to Telex, the director of the Szent Antal Ferences High School and College listed at length what kind of trainings the teachers took in order to recognize child abuse in the institution and be able to deal with it.
“Due to the events, the school administrator urged the requirement of zero tolerance required by law, also in child protection matters in his institutions, and asked for the reinforcement of the school’s child protection team”
he wrote.
However, the teachers involved were not removed, but the student, who otherwise loves sports, was exempted from physical education classes.
The parents took the boy out of the dormitory in April, so he goes to school from Budapest, which means he travels four hours a day in order to finish the school year. And from September, he will change schools and continue his studies in the capital.
