Was there any more sexual misconduct at TBI Kelapa Gading?
Who did it involve?
One incident involved suspicious dealings with a local teacher. The other involved a TBI student; Helmy V was really caught in the act there. The third case involved the student assistants. He was generally sleazy and sexual in his manner of speaking to them and it wasn’t appreciated. I don’t think the sexual harassment graduated beyond comments with the TBI office staff. Unlike TBI Semarang, where multiple claims of sexual misconduct were formally lodged, there were never any formal complaints.
What happened with the local teacher?
Helmy V. had hired two Indonesian teachers to teach the local component of the 50-50 Native-Local classes. One of them was a middle-aged man and the other was a young woman, whose name I won’t mention. Let’s call her Ms. ABC. Ms. ABC was an attractive young woman.
After just a few days Helmy V. fired the Indonesian man without even announcing it to me. This guy just vanished and the teachers were asking me where he had gone. I didn’t know! So I asked Helmy and he said that the teacher wasn’t any good; there had been student complaints. So he had given all of that man’s hours to Ms. ABC and she was now working around 12 hours a week, or somewhere thereabouts.
Just a couple of days later I came into the staffroom and Helmy V. was in there with Ms. ABC. He was sitting on her desk while she was standing and they were really close, like almost touching. I mean I know there are different rules for ‘body space’ in different cultures but I lived in Indonesia for many years: he was as close as you can get without being intimate; he was really in her body space. I was surprised by what I was seeing. There was highly sexualised appearance to the whole thing. Alarm bells started ringing.
