Why sex abuse charges against a Toronto teacher took 20 years to reach court

The Globe and Mail    The Service Ontario office on Lawrence Avenue West is the most public of places: public in its stream of passersby and public in the sense that it’s a conduit, bland and efficient, to the government.

That is where Joe Schacter sat down at a computer terminal in December and began looking at child pornography, police say.

Mr. Schacter reportedly appeared surprised when people were alarmed enough by the photos, allegedly of little boys in bathing suits, that they called police. The 55-year-old, a retired teacher at two private Orthodox Jewish schools, was arrested and charged.

That news, reported in local media, ended a 20-year internal battle for Adam, a North York man. He picked up his phone and asked to speak to a police detective. Joe Schacter, he said, had coached him into performing sex acts for three years of his childhood.

Adam was in his 40s and he says in every year of his adult life he had talked himself out of making that call. “‘I should go to the cops,’” he would say to himself. “‘I should go to the cops. I should go to the cops.’”

Then, always, came a second thought: “You could destroy your life. You could destroy your kids.”

Adam’s allegation that Mr. Schacter was a sexual predator was not new to police and certainly not to many in Toronto’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail and interviews with community members, Mr. Schacter has been accused multiple times over a 23-year period of sexually assaulting little boys. In the early nineties, criminal charges were laid, then withdrawn. A decade later, after more allegations, the Ontario College of Teachers ordered a disciplinary hearing. It was canceled and Mr. Schacter continued to teach until he retired in 2013.

There’s no documentation about why the cases were dropped, but in the close-knit community, it was understood that the children had recanted, their families unwilling to proceed.[...]