AP: Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools

[Oceanbreeze]

I was freshman in highschool in 1982. I had a geography teacher and if you flirted with him you were guranteed an A. I flat out refused to flirt with the fat middle aged SLOB. ( :lmao I'm his age now. :lmao) I got great grades, but brought home a B. Ohhh...my mama was not a happy camper. I had saved all my papers, my mom brought them and said "show me how this equals a B? and tell how my daughter told me how the girls' earn an A" Heads rolled. Not pretty. Then there was the band teacher who ended up marrying one of his student, but he had +20 years on her. I just don't get it. I guess it's lack of attention for the student and no excuses for the teacher.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071020/D8SD2M700.html

[Kurtz]

The young teacher hung his head, avoiding eye contact. Yes, he had touched a fifth-grader's breast during recess. "I guess it was just lust of the flesh," he told his boss.

That got Gary C. Lindsey fired from his first teaching job in Oelwein, Iowa. But it didn't end his career. He taught for decades in Illinois and Iowa, fending off at least a half-dozen more abuse accusations.

When he finally surrendered his teaching license in 2004 — 40 years after that first little girl came forward — it wasn't a principal or a state agency that ended his career. It was one persistent victim and her parents.

An Associated Press investigation found more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.

There are 3 million public school teachers nationwide, most devoted to their work. Yet the number of abusive educators — nearly three for every school day — speaks to a much larger problem in a system that is stacked against victims.

Most of the abuse never gets reported. Those cases reported often end with no action. Cases investigated sometimes can't be proven, and many abusers have several victims.

And no one — not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments — has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms.

Those are the findings of an AP investigation in which reporters sought disciplinary records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an unprecedented national look at the scope of sex offenses by educators — the very definition of breach of trust.

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.


One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that's sexual in nature.

Jennah Bramow, one of Lindsey's accusers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wonders why there isn't more outrage.

"You're supposed to be able to send your kids to school knowing that they're going to be safe," says Bramow, now 20. While other victims accepted settlement deals and signed confidentiality agreements, she sued her city's schools for failing to protect her and others from Lindsey — and won. Only then was Lindsey's teaching license finally revoked.

As an 8-year-old elementary-school student, Bramow told how Lindsey forced her hand on what she called his "pee-pee."

"How did you know it was his pee-pee?" an interviewer at St. Luke's Child Protection Center in Cedar Rapids asked Jennah in a videotape, taken in 1995.

"'Cause I felt something?" said Jennah, then a fidgety girl with long, dark hair.

"How did it feel?" the investigator asked.

"Bumpy," Jennah replied. She drew a picture that showed how Lindsey made her touch him on the zipper area of his pants.

Lindsey, now 68, refused multiple requests for an interview. "It never occurs to you people that some people don't want their past opened back up," he said when an AP reporter approached him at his home outside Cedar Rapids and asked questions.

That past, according to evidence presented in the Bramow's civil case, included accusations from students and parents along with reprimands from principals that were filed away, explained away and ultimately ignored until 1995, when accusations from Bramow and two other girls forced his early retirement. Even then, he kept his teaching license until the Bramows took the case public and filed a complaint with the state.

Like Lindsey, the perpetrators that the AP found are everyday educators — teachers, school psychologists, principals and superintendents among them. They're often popular and recognized for excellence and, in nearly nine out of 10 cases, they're male. While some abused students in school, others were cited for sexual misconduct after hours that didn't necessarily involve a kid from their classes, such as viewing or distributing child pornography.


For one, many Americans deny the problem, and even treat the abuse with misplaced fascination. Popular media reports trumpet relationships between attractive female teachers and male students.

"It's dealt with in a salacious manner with late-night comedians saying 'What 14-year-old boy wouldn't want to have sex with his teacher?' It trivializes the whole issue," says Robert Shoop, a professor of educational administration at Kansas State University who has written a book aimed at helping school districts identify and deal with sexual misconduct.

"In other cases, it's reported as if this is some deviant who crawled into the school district — 'and now that they're gone, everything's OK.' But it's much more prevalent than people would think."

The AP investigation found efforts to stop individual offenders but, overall, a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse. It starts in school hallways, where fellow teachers look away or feel powerless to help. School administrators make behind-the-scenes deals to avoid lawsuits and other trouble. And in state capitals and Congress, lawmakers shy from tough state punishments or any cohesive national policy for fear of disparaging a vital profession.




Yeah, it's a long article and it is extremely disgustin', but here's how the article ends:



In Iowa, the state Supreme Court made the opposite ruling in the Bramow case, deciding she and her parents could sue the Cedar Rapids schools for failing to stop Lindsey.

Bramow, now a young mother who waits tables for a living, won a $20,000 judgment. But Lindsey was never criminally charged due to what the former county prosecutor deemed insufficient evidence.

Arthur Sensor, the former superintendent in Oelwein, Iowa, who vividly recalls pressuring Lindsey to quit on Feb. 18, 1964, regrets that he didn't do more to stop him back then.

Now, he says, he'd call the police.

"He promised me he wouldn't do it again — that he had learned. And he was a young man, a beginning teacher, had a young wife, a young child," Sensor, now 86 years old, said during testimony at the Bramows' civil trial.

"I wanted to believe him, and I did."



Spoze the ABUSE of power 'n trust will end?
Especially if we don't have sex education in schools?
Yeah, parents...teach your children well...

[Kurtz]

Oh, and I only ripped a portion of it.
There's more at the link OB posted.

Here, I'll post it again for you who
might want to read the entire article:
LINK (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071021/ap_on_re_us/teacher_sex_abuse;_ylt=Ano9AbeicbHq3ZVfQX69lg1vzwc F)

[crazierthanever]

Here's another subject that pisses me off so much I can't get the words to come out of the end of my fingers.

[Sweet Tart]

My high school choir teacher once made a reference to my "big balloons" or something like that.

My college music professor actually once asked me if I was still "reasonable" as we were walking out from class. :think I found out not too long after that that there was a rumor circulating that I was a prostitute.

[Kurtz]

Unless there's a videotape of a teacher involved with a child, everyone wants to believe the authority figure, says Wayne Promisel, a retired Virginia detective who has investigated many sex abuse cases.

He and others who track the problem reiterated one point repeatedly during the AP investigation: Very few abusers get caught.

They point to several academic studies estimating that only about one in 10 victimized children report sexual abuse of any kind to someone who can do something about it.

Teachers, administrators and even parents frequently don't, or won't, recognize the signs that a crime is taking place.

"They can't see what's in front of their face. Not unlike a kid in an alcoholic family, who'll say 'My family is great,'" says McGrath, the California lawyer and investigator who now trains entire school systems how to recognize what she calls the unmistakable "red flags" of misconduct.

In Hamburg, Pa., in 2002, those "red flags" should have been clear. A student skipped classes every day to spend time with one teacher. He gave her gifts and rides in his car. She sat on his lap. The bond ran so deep that the student got chastised repeatedly — even suspended once for being late and absent so often. But there were no questions for the teacher.

Heather Kline was 12, a girl with a broad smile and blond hair pulled back tight. Teacher Troy Mansfield had cultivated her since she was in his third-grade class.

"Kids, like, idolized me because they thought I was, like, cool because he paid more attention to me," says Kline, now 18, sitting at her mother's kitchen table, sorting through a file of old poems and cards from Mansfield. "I was just like really comfortable. I could tell him anything."

He never pushed her, just raised the stakes, bit by bit — a comment about how good she looked, a gift, a hug.

She was sure she was in love.

By winter of seventh grade, he was sneaking her off in his car for an hour of sex, dropping in on her weekly baby-sitting duties, e-mailing about what clothes she should wear, about his sexual fantasies, about marriage and children.

Mansfield finally got caught by the girl's mother, and his own words convicted him. At his criminal trial in 2004, Heather read his e-mails and instant messages aloud, from declarations of true love to explicit references to past sex. He's serving up to 31 years in state prison.

The growing use of e-mails and text messages is leaving a trail that investigators and prosecutors can use to prove an intimate relationship when other evidence is hard to find.

Even then, many in the community find it difficult to accept that a predator is in their midst. When these cases break, defendants often portray the students as seducers or false accusers. However, every investigator questioned said that is largely a misconception.


I guess I just can't stop postin'.

[Kurtz]

My high school choir teacher once made a reference to my "big balloons" or something like that.

My college music professor actually once asked me if I was still "reasonable" as we were walking out from class. :think I found out not too long after that that there was a rumor circulating that I was a prostitute.

I was 'fondled' by a piano teacher.
When I told my dad, he called me a slut.

[Oceanbreeze]

Oh, and I only ripped a portion of it.
There's more at the link OB posted.

Here, I'll post it again for you who
might want to read the entire article:
LINK (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071021/ap_on_re_us/teacher_sex_abuse;_ylt=Ano9AbeicbHq3ZVfQX69lg1vzwc F)

I do think sex ed belongs in the classroom. I took sex ed back in 1981, but they didn't teach about sexual harassment. Also, both my girls had been taught in preschool, "good touch, bad touch". The problem I have is schools dispensing contraceptives, particularly the birth control pill, specifically because it needs to be dispensed by a DOCTOR.

[Kurtz]

I forgot to mention the piano teacher was a good friend of my dad's.
And of course, there was no evidence since an examination revealed I was 'in tact.'

Yeah, evidence, that makes all the difference!

Or maybe it's that ol' story about Adam 'n Eve
'n that temptation thing about lust of the flesh.

[Sweet Tart]

Ugh, Kurtz. I'm sorry :( That's exactly why kids don't report it, and women don't report rape... the fear that no one will believe them :(

[Oceanbreeze]

I'm sorry Kurtz, I wish more kids/adults would report. They are survivors and the guilty should be punished.

[toxic]

I was 'fondled' by a piano teacher.
When I told my dad, he called me a slut.

This reminds me of the Religious TV Channel I flipped by about 2 months ago.

A Latin (appeared Catholic) Priest was ranting. He referenced a situation where a young girl had LURED her stepfather into a sexual situation.

I could not believe my ears. Although this seems consistent with christian ravings of women tempting poor defenseless men since Eve.

I was most suprised to find out my younger brother in high school was in competition for a girl with their Ceramics Teacher. Even more surprising was my mother's complete lack of interest in the subject. She said, the girl was mature for her age???????????????/

[cassandra]

This is so upsetting. :(

[Kurtz]

This reminds me of the Religious TV Channel I flipped by about 2 months ago.

A Latin (appeared Catholic) Priest was ranting. He referenced a situation where a young girl had LURED her stepfather into a sexual situation.

I could not believe my ears. Although this seems consistent with christian ravings of women tempting poor defenseless men since Eve.

I was most suprised to find out my younger brother in high school was in competition for a girl with their Ceramics Teacher. Even more surprising was my mother's complete lack of interest in the subject. She said, the girl was mature for her age???????????????/

:yep

Weird story, ain't it?

I do hate it when kids are made to feel it was THEIR OWN fault.

Great post, toxic!

[crazierthanever]

I forgot to mention the piano teacher was a good friend of my dad's.
And of course, there was no evidence since an examination revealed I was 'in tact.'

Yeah, evidence, that makes all the difference!

Or maybe it's that ol' story about Adam 'n Eve
'n that temptation thing about lust of the flesh.

I'm really sorry, my friend. :hug


You know what I'm thinkin.