Schools Sweep Sex Abuse Under Rug

Teachers and school administrators never tire of telling us, often in the most syrupy of tones, how committed they are to the welfare of the wonderful, wonderful children in their care.

But if you want to see that alleged commitment vanish, let some of those children become the victims of sexually predatory teachers.

Recent studies have shown that teachers who abuse their students generally receive much more sympathy and support within their school systems than their victims do.

Two professors from Hofstra University, Charol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan, conducted a fouryear nationwide study of sexual abuse of students by school personnel.

Their findings show that the system essentially is rigged against the kids.

“Investigations tended to be poorly carried out,” they wrote. “Superintendents rarely contacted the police or the district attorney’s office, nor did they usually report the allegations to child-abuse hotlines.”

Shakeshaft and Cohan continued: “Our interviews with superintendents and our discussions with school staffs revealed that school personnel have a tendency to move very quickly from talking about the safety of children to talking about the safety of adults.”

The two professors cited one case in which a school superintendent acknowledged that a male elementary-school teacher was “patting kids” in various places. Shakeshaft and Cohan wrote: “The superintendent characterized this behavior as ‘not serious,’ even though some of the places were the students’ breasts, genitals and buttocks.”

The study continued: “Another superintendent described a case in which a ‘male teacher was involved in fellatio’ in the middle of a local shopping center parking lot at 3:10 p.m. The victim was ‘an emotionally disturbed female student from his special-education class.’ The student was told by the district to ‘stay away from the teacher.”’

While it is important to make clear that the vast majority of teachers and administrators are not abusing students, it nevertheless is true that there are many documented instances of sexual contact between school personnel and students, that the actual number of instances is much higher than documented and that most cases that come to light either are ignored or are not given the serious attention they deserve.

Usually, the most vulnerable students are targeted for abuse, especially those with emotional difficulties.

The study by Shakeshaft and Cohan and a report compiled by a special commission on sex abuse in the New York City school system both found that special-education children are represented disproportionately among victims.

The New York City report said the “communication difficulties, credibility concerns and/or emotional disabilities” of special-education students make them “easy prey for abusers.”

The unwillingness of supposedly responsible adults to recognize that sexual abuse is occurring can be astonishing.

The New York City report said that in one case, substantiated by the special commissioner of investigation for the New York City School District, “colleagues of the offender continued to deny the allegations could be true, despite a full taped confession by the offender of the conduct alleged.”

The simple fact is that teachers and administrators tend to care much more about their careers than about the welfare of the children in their charge.

Sex abuse cases are a threat to one and all, and so the goal almost invariably is to make them go away as fast and as quietly as possible. If that means squelching the children who are involved, so be it.

Even in those cases in which some kind of response is inevitable, the tendency is to take the most minimal action possible.

Shakeshaft and Cohan found that school authorities tried to revoke the teaching license of a teacher who sexually had abused a student in only 1 percent of the more than 200 cases they surveyed.

They found that far more common is a practice dubbed by teachers and administrators as “passing the trash” - transferring a teacher accused of sexual abuse to another school district without informing the new district of the allegations.

How’s that for an example of looking out for the wonderful, wonderful children?