Piling on the pressure

At first glance, it looks like a spiteful move.

After seeing the controversy over Facebook

photos and misguided teenage girls wind down, the criminal charges filed by St. Theresa’s College surprised many.

Didn’t the March 30 graduation come and go as the school wanted — with five seniors banished from the solemn rites for commiting “obscene” and shameless conduct?

Didn’t the judge who pilloried the school for showing “unChristian” behaviour (his words, not ours), throw up his hands and bow out of the case?

Didn’t the main petitioner, the daughter of a physician, accept a compromise agreement and withdraw her lawsuit against STC, leaving three other girls and their families to pursue the case?

Wasn’t the community told time and time again that upright Christian conduct and morality were being upheld 24/7 by a private Catholic school with 79 years of an untarnished reputation?

Given time, you would think the whole dispute would work itself out, so that young lives can go on.

With June coming, a future ahead means time for enrollment in some college or university where the ordeal of being branded Jezebels in and out of school would be over.

But that’s not to be.

Ranged against teenage girls, whose parents could not be full identified in the media frenzy that followed, call a press conference, gather signature petitions or send press statements, the criminal charges filed against three parents and a guardian look woefully like an overkill.

It was not enough to tell the parents/guardian that their daughters had broken school norms of conduct, including an Internet-savvy rule against uploading pictures that expose “ample body coverage” and showing off part of your bra during Sinulog street dancing.

The school had to point a finger as well at the parents and call them criminally negligent.

STC’s latest move appears more of a legal strategy to pile on the pressure. The aim is clearly to force the girls’ elders to hand them the olive branch as soon as they suffer litigation fatigue.

School officials are also suffering from the bad publicity and the emotional stress of being sued and charged with violating the Child Abuse law as well.

Somewhere between the campus punishment and the whole media spectacle of a private school versus wards entrusted to them is a tragic loss of compassion.

If a lesson has to be made, it’s certainly exacted its measure of trauma.

To what extent will this expensive, pain-filled lesson be drawn out to prove that only one party has to end up being called right and just?