AP: Sexual misconduct plagues US schools

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2007-10-20 19:35

Article here. Almost no reference at all to female teachers molesting students. Only one mention in the entire article:

'• Rebecca A. Boicelli, a former teacher in Redwood City, Calif. She conceived a child with a 16-year-old former student then went on maternity leave in 2004 while police investigated. She was hired to teach in a nearby school district; board members said police hadn't told them about the investigation.'

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"...nearly 9 out of every 10 is male..."

Blah, blah, blah.... be afraid of men.

9 out of every 10 REPORTED may be male but considering the ever shrinking male population of teaching professionals and the FACT that women sexually abuse children far more often then any of us care to imagine means that in reality it's probably more like 1 in every 10 ACTUAL cases (not reported ones) involves a male perpetrator

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Submitted by Paragon on Sat, 2007-10-20 22:31

I'm shocked, completely shocked, that we live in an imperfect world in which some adults take advantage of the kids.

That's the attitude behind this. "We've gotta prosecute until there's no more of the bastids!" But that's never going to happen. There will always be a teacher touching a child and getting away with it.

Meanwhile, by pretending that all allegations are equally credible, the child protection zealots are doing more harm to society than the abusers are doing. They're destroying the authority of the teachers, preventing them from doing their jobs, and creating an atmosphere of stark, screaming terror for the kids.

Somewhere in America, a kid will again be touched by a teacher. This is horrible, but life will go on. If this is reported and corroborated by evidence, you prosecute. If not then you give the teacher the benefit of the doubt.

The schools are doing exactly the right thing. You can't allow any student to destroy any teacher merely by telling a story.

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Submitted by Sosickoftheirlies on Sat, 2007-10-20 23:18

Be careful with these statistics (always good advice!)

According to the article, there are 3 million public school teachers, and 2,500 cases over five years "in which educators were punished". Presumably the latter number include all those convicted in a court of law (and hence we are entitled to assume were indeed guilty); but might also include others who might have been punished without being convicted - and who might therefore also be innocent. The article does not elaborate (do they ever?)

So taking it at face value, that's 500 cases a year on average, or one case per 6,000 teachers. Now of course there may be thousands of unreported cases, but who can possibly ascertain the truth or otherwise of that?

But considering the close proximity of teachers and pupils, the endless opportunities for unscrupulous teachers to find victims, and the cases where the boot is on the other foot and it is the pupil setting out to seduce the teacher, it sounds to me as if the teaching profession is behaving extremely well overall, and has very few bad apples in the barrel compared to its numbers. How many professions can claim only 1 in 6,000 of its members commit the most serious offence associated with that profession, each year?

So hardly a reason for any kind of hysteria, and very misleading to say "Students in America's schools are groped. They're raped. They're pursued, seduced and think they're in love." One in six thousand maybe! And it is hardly a "plague".

Ah, but then there are men to be demonised, so exaggeration becomes a favoured tool to achieve that objective...

"Civilisation: man's greatest, and most unappreciated, gift to women"

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Submitted by PaulP on Sun, 2007-10-21 12:32