How sexual misconduct in schools is condoned and ignored
“The buck stopped with no one,” said lawyer Bob Weaver to the Portland Public School Board during an investigation of sexual abuse by school faculty. In 2017, the school board had ordered an investigation into the treatment of Mitch Whitehurst, a teacher who had demonstrated a pattern of misconduct with students.
In his first year as a teacher, Whitehurst’s conduct with students was so noticeably inappropriate that a vice-principal reported it to school police. The next year, there was another complaint about Whitehurst from a student’s mother. Years later, in the late 90s, school police were again notified about Whitehurst. The school district heard all of these complaints and did nothing.
In 2001, Whitehurst told high school student Rose Soto that he wanted to unzip her pants and take her to a motel. “I must not have mattered enough. I sure as hell didn’t feel protected by anybody,” Soto told The Oregonian.
While the story of how Whitehurst’s persistent sexual harassment and abuse of students was apathetically ignored by the education system is certainly a repulsive one, it is also, unfortunately, not a very unique one. In Education Week’s sixth-month examination of the issue, they discovered “244 cases, involving everything from unwanted touching to years-long sexual relationships and serial rape.”
“One reason such cases can prove so divisive is that they often involve teachers who are among the most popular and dedicated in the school.”
These cases included a coach who videotaped volleyball players in the changing room, an English teacher who fathered a child with a 16-year old student, and a 6th-grade teacher who had sex with four eleven-year-old boys. While more than 70% of the suspects were teachers- janitors, librarians, principals, and bus drivers were also on the list. “One reason such cases can prove so divisive is that they often involve teachers who are among the most popular and dedicated in the school,” writes Caroline Hendrie for Education Week.
In another year-long investigation by USA Today, it was found that education officials often cover up evidence of abuse by faculty. They found that “state education agencies across the country have ignored a federal ban on signing secrecy deals with teachers suspected of abusing minors, a practice informally known as ‘passing the trash,’” and that administrators are rarely punished for failing to report misconduct to state licensing officials.
In New Jersey, Montville Township Public Schools wanted to get rid of a first-grade teacher who was accused of asking students to sit on his lap. They did not, however, report the accusations to police. The teacher was hired by a nearby private school less than two months after resigning.
A teacher lost his license in Ohio after being accused of touching students in a “sexually suggestive manner,” and the district made efforts to keep the records of these accusations a secret. “In some cases, school districts agree to eliminate personnel records, making it all but impossible to tell what the teacher was accused of doing,” writes Steve Reilley for USA Today.
It’s in our nature to want to believe that the world is a safe place and that such terrible things could not go on in such vast numbers right under our noses– but it’s time for us to accept the reality of this situation.
We have to be careful that we aren’t committing the just-world fallacy, making the assumption that the world is a just place where people get what they deserve. Often, they do not.
According to Charol Shakeshaft, who studies educator abuse:
“In elementary schools, the abuser is often one of the people that students most like and that parents most trust. In my studies, the abusers of children younger than seventh grade have different patterns than those who abuse older children.
The educators who target elementary school children are often high achievers in the profession and, compared to their non-abusing counterparts, hold a disproportionate number of awards and teaching recognitions. They are more often recognized in the community, the state, and sometimes the nation as distinguished and dedicated educators.
While the issue of sexual assaults on college campuses has been discussed at length in the public sphere in the wake of the #metoo era, the similar problems in K-12 schools are often left out of the conversation. According to federal data, students reported about 9,700 incidents of rape and assault at elementary and secondary schools during the 2015–2016 school year.
“The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
NBC News reported on how new Title IX regulations might help, but the problem appears to be getting worse, not better. When we think of children in potentially predatory situations, we may think of the Boy Scouts, or of the Catholic Church, but we ignore the more common danger to which a larger number of kids are exposed. Charol Shakeshaft is quoted as saying: “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
“What typically happens is you’ll have a teacher who’s spending a little too much time in a room with one child with the door shut,” says Sherryll Kraizer, executive director of the Denver-based Safe Child Program. This problem is so widespread because of the sheer amount of access that teachers and school faculty have to students.
Diane Cranley, the founder of TAALK, thinks that it is important that faculty are trained in how to recognize grooming behaviors. It’s important to recognize that the friendly grooming behavior of a teacher might not be much different from the behavior of a priest or a troop leader. “Even in churches, you might only have access to children once a week on Sundays … whereas with schools, it’s five days of the week, nine months of the year,” Cranley told The Voice of San Diego.
A US Department of Education report found that about one in ten students will experience sexual misconduct from a school employee before they graduate high school. A 2010 GAO report found that one offender can have as many as 73 victims. Low-income female high school students are the highest-risk demographic.
When a problem is this persistent, and there’s such an incredible commitment by so many to keep it hidden from the public, it’s troubling to think about how many victims probably exist who have not yet come forward.
Please talk to your children, fellow parents, friends, and schools about educator abuse.
Additional Resources:
Guidelines for Dealing With Educator Sexual Misconduct
7 Ways Teachers Can Help Prevent Child Sexual Abuse
Originally published on medium.com on August 29th, 2020.
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