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T A B L E++T A L K Parenting is hard, but kids are great. Gush over the great things your children do in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y We've come a long way, baby Dear bridal party Spoiled rotten Mothers who think too much Ask Dr. Love BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK HOT FLASH ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME | PAGE 1, 2
When a student comes forward and reports a teacher for some form of sexual harassment, do the schools typically follow up? In our studies we found that schools do very little. Even when kids directly report what happened, schools often ignore it, don't investigate, tell the children that they must be making it up, assume that since they knew the teacher -- and didn't think the teacher was that kind of person -- that it must not be true. Schools don't take seriously the complaints, the rumors, even their own eyes. They walk into a classroom, they see a child sitting on a teacher's lap, they see a teacher having lunch with the same child every day, they see the teacher leaving the school day after day with the same child, getting into a car. And they don't say, maybe we want to see what's going on. But tracking down sexual relations between a student and a teacher can be difficult. Some teachers and students just have close relationships -- taking the form of mentoring relationships, requiring a lot of extra time together ... We don't know how hard it is because most people don't try to investigate any relationship between teachers and students. What we do know is that there are very few teachers who are wrongly or falsely accused of sexual abuse or harassment. In most cases, a few discussions with the teacher would make clear what kind of relationship the teacher had with the student. Teachers can have close, caring relationships. The question is: Are there boundaries that are being violated? In your study, under what circumstances did the teachers seduce the students? There have been incidents of teachers turning out the lights and showing a movie and then taking the students to the back of the room to have sex with them. One kid was a top music student and the band director started spending extra time with her and then began a sexual relationship. There are incidents of teachers taking students into a closet, touching them, taking their clothes off, having intercourse with them while the others are in the classroom; of teachers taking students away from school to get an ice cream cone and then out to a remote area to have sex. Sometimes the students think they love the teacher, sometimes they're terrified of the teacher. How long does it typically go on before it stops? A lot of the physical sexual abuse of students -- particularly intercourse -- may go on for years. For older kids, they often last two to three years, for younger kids it may last the year the child is in the class with that teacher. Often it ends because they're caught, or the student tells a friend and the friend tells her parents and the parents report it. Are girls more likely to be hit on? Almost all of the sexual abuse comes from male abusers. The largest proportion is to a female, but it's followed closely by male teachers with heterosexual identities having sex with male students. It appears that Gebser did meet her teacher on different occasions of her own will. Can there be such a thing as a consensual relationship between a 14-year-old and a teacher? First of all, a 14-year-old is a child and there is never legally a consensual relationship between a child and an adult. So it doesn't matter if the child takes off all of his or her clothes or begs, "Please, please, please, I want to have sex," because having sex with a child is against the law. When you have sex with a child, you have violated their rights -- even if they wanted to have sex, you have taken an unequal power situation and taken advantage of it. How can schools be more vigilant in tracking down these cases? First, they need to write their sexual harassment policies and then teach the students, faculty and parents about them. Second, they keep them posted and review them once a year. And third, when schools see things, when they hear rumors, when there's widespread discussion, they need to check into it. They can't just assume that nothing's going on. They can't say, until someone comes to me directly and says this teacher's doing this to me I'm not going to pay attention. They need to ask questions, they need to look out for the students. In past lawsuits won by sexually harassed students, the damages awarded have been as high as $1 million. Educators are saying that this level of settlement can financially cripple a school district. First of all, school districts are insured, so the notion that this money comes right out of the operating budget is not accurate. Secondly, if school districts did what they were supposed to, they wouldn't have to worry. Third, financial liability has been the only mechanism that has worked to get schools to change their practices and hand out sexual harassment policies. What the Supreme Court justices are saying is that it's more important to protect the insurance companies from these problems than it is to make sure that sexual abuse of kids by adults stops. In this case, the teacher was criminally prosecuted. Do you think that's enough protection for students? Sexually harassed or abused students still have the recourse of the criminal justice system. Yeah, they have the criminal system, but the criminal system doesn't do anything about damages or encourage school districts to do what they're supposed to do. Criminal process may punish an individual abuser but it does not stop the systematic abuse. It has always been against the law for an adult to have sex with a child, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. And that hasn't encouraged school districts to write policies that educate students to complain and follow up on complaints -- only liability seems to do that.
Below the
belt
Two new books explore the ambigious terrain of sexual harassment.
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