The Child Protection eNewsletter

Sexual misconduct plagues schools… 

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.  Read More  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.  Lindsey's case is just a small example of a widespread problem in American schools: sexual misconduct by the very teachers who are supposed to be nurturing the nation's children.

Students in America's schools are groped.  They're raped.  They're pursued, seduced and think they're in love.

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.

Young people were the victims in at least 1,801 of the cases, and more than 80 percent of those were students.  At least half the educators who were punished by their states also were convicted of crimes related to their misconduct.

The findings draw obvious comparisons to sex abuse scandals in other institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church.  A review by America's Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002.

Clergy abuse is part of the national consciousness after a string of highly publicized cases.  But until now, there's been little sense of the extent of educator abuse.

Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the larger shame is that the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that's been apparent for years.

"From my own experience -- this could get me in trouble -- I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator.  At least one," says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools.  "It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural or suburban."

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.

Every school has rules governing teacher behavior.  Read More  Every state has laws against child abuse, and many specifically outlaw teachers taking sexual liberties with students.  Every district has administrators who watch out for sexual misconduct by teachers.

But legal loopholes, fear of lawsuits and inattention all have weakened the safeguards that are supposed to protect children in school.  The system fails hundreds of kids each year, an AP investigation found.  It undoubtedly fails many more whose offenders go free.

State efforts to strengthen laws against sex abuse by teachers have run into opposition from school boards and teachers unions.  In Congress, a measure that would train investigators and create a national registry of offenders hasn't even gotten a hearing.  Few leaders recognize -- let alone attack -- a national shame. 

Even accounting for population differences, states vary widely on how many teachers they discipline and how rigorously, the investigation showed.  That reflects the patchwork nature of the laws and rules that aim to protect schoolchildren.  Each state takes its own approach to background checks, fingerprinting and reporting abuse.

While states have taken halting steps toward accountability in recent years after decades of widespread neglect, there are still many gaps.  Some states check fingerprints against records only in their own states, not the FBI databases, so they miss offenders from other states.  Others only check for violations when teachers are newly hired, missing veteran teachers who have run afoul of the law since they were first hired.

Meanwhile, The Washington Times reports that while more than 1,600 teaching licenses were revoked because of sexual-misconduct accusations from 2001 to 2005, none came from the District of Columbia, according to an Associated Press investigation.  Read More  D.C. officials did not revoke the certification of a single teacher during that time, no matter how serious the crime.

For example, Brandon C. Jones, a former gym teacher at Backus Middle School in D. C., was accused of having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student and entered an Alford plea in 2004 to a third-degree sexual offense for arranging an encounter with her at a Laurel hotel.

Despite the plea, the D.C. Office of Academic Credentials and Standards never formally removed Jones from the rolls of those licensed to teach in the city.  As a result, his name was never added to a national database of teachers whose certification has been revoked.

If you or someone you love has been the victim of educator abuse, visit http://www.sesamenet.org/

In Other News… 

Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani hired a Catholic priest to work in his consulting firm months after the priest was accused of sexually molesting two former students and an altar boy and told by the church to stop performing his priestly duties.  Read More  The priest, Monsignor Alan Placa, a longtime friend of Giuliani and the priest who officiated at his second wedding to Donna Hanover, continues to work at Giuliani Partners in New York, to the outrage of some of his accusers and victims' groups, which have begun to protest at Giuliani campaign events.

Newsweek’s October 29th issue has a feature article “Inside Karen’s Crowded Mind,” which looks at the life and therapy of a Dissociative Identity Disorder patient.  Read More

A Canadian schoolteacher accused of sexually abusing over a dozen boys was arrested Friday in rural Thailand after an unprecedented public appeal from Interpol had turned him into the world's most wanted suspected pedophile.  Read More  The suspect, 32-year-old Christopher Paul Neil, had been hiding in the town of a Thai friend who arranged some of his alleged sexual liaisons with boys, police said.

A group of children found a boy's naked body jammed into a suitcase floating in a duck pond at a suburban Sydney, Australia park, triggering a murder investigation and a police warning to parents.  Read More  There was widespread outrage at the apparent brutality directed toward the unidentified child, who police said did not match the description of anyone on missing-persons lists, though clues indicated the body had been there for days.

The popular online social network Facebook Inc. is being sued by an Indiana woman who alleges it has profited from its members sending thousands of unauthorized text messages to mobile phone users whose numbers previously belonged to other people.  Read More  The lawsuit, filed Monday in a San Jose federal court, highlights the confusion and frustration that can arise as Web sites extend their services to mobile handsets with phone numbers that have been reassigned, or "recycled," after another customer's service ended.

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