The Education Ministry's received 30 sexual harassment complaints from educators in 2016, compared to 13 such cases in 2015, a new report said Sunday. Oshra Lerer Shaib, the ministry's gender equality commissioner, said that in 2015, 10 complaints were made by teachers and three by Education Ministry employees, whereas 29 of the complaints handled in 2016 were filed by educators, and only one was made by a ministry employee. According to the data, the Education Ministry received 14 sexual harassment complaints from ministry employees in 2014. In 2013 the ministry received 10 such complaints. A ministry official attributed the increase in the number complaints to increased public awareness and the ministry's efforts to encourage victims of sexual assault and harassment to come forward. The ministry, he said, "knows that as a result of the public discourse and awareness, which are important and welcomed, of course, victims of sexual assault have the courage to file complaints of incidents that happened in the past, sometimes of incidents that happened a few years earlier." Orit Soliciano, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, said that in light of the new data, "there is no doubt the past statistics on the number of harassment incidents reported by personnel in the education system, which employs thousands of people, indicated under-reporting. The rise in public awareness is important to the gradual rise in reporting. Sexual harassment is a widespread phenomenon and it is important for the education system to offer comprehensive information to employees to handle every incident of harassment in a decisive manner."
According to the Education Ministry, schools employ 136,000 teachers, of whom 108,000 are women and 28,000 are men. In some cases, the complaints made were anonymous, and not every case reviewed warranted a response against the alleged harasser. Methods of handling a case include reprimand, suspension, transferring the harasser to another institution and dismissal.
