Deepfaked Teachers. When The Law Can't Help, Schools Must.
- Kirra Pendergast
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
What schools, parents and educators need to understand about deepfakes, digital abuse, and the gap where real harm lives.
Before you start reading this please know the information in this post is provided as general guidance only and does not constitute legal advice. Every situation is different, and the legal frameworks governing work health and safety obligations vary across Australian jurisdictions. If you are a school leader, diocesan officer, or department representative navigating a specific incident or seeking to understand your organisation's compliance obligations, please seek advice from a qualified workplace health and safety lawyer or your relevant regulatory authority.
Seven emails in two months. Six schools across Australia, and one Police command, landing in my inbox because they had exhausted every official channel available to them reported, waited, followed up, waited again and the content was still there. Still circulating. Still doing its damage.
The situations vary in their details but share the same shape. A teacher discovers that a video of them, manipulated beyond recognition, is circulating in a group chat before they have even arrived at school. A student has posted something that is not quite defamatory enough to trigger legal action, but is specific enough, and sustained enough, and visible enough to the exact community the teacher works in every day, that walking through the front gate the next morning requires a particular kind of courage that nobody trained for the job expecting to need.
A school leader finds themselves with a staff member in crisis, a parent community in uproar, no clear pathway forward no policy or procedure to follow that fits.
After the description of what has happened, the description of how they were told it is not considered "serious and harmful" the comments are always the same.
Surely the law covers this. Surely something can be done.
