Every month, around 300 to 500 public school teachers are arrested or charged for incidents involving a minor, including sexual assault on minors. The majority of these cases do not receive much attention in the media and often school districts will “pass the trash”; quietly removing an offending teacher and using confidentiality agreements to cover up incidents, allowing that employee to simply move on to another school district and repeat the pattern all over again.
These cases tend to start with lewd conduct – Teachers acting inappropriately or making sexualized comments with multiple students. They are punished by school officials, but the action is kept under wraps. The teacher then moves to another county and does something even worse.
For example, a teacher in NJ became the subject of a media firestorm last year when he was caught in multiple instances over the course of several years engaging in sexual discussions and behavior with students. These incidents including dropping items in front of female students, telling them to pick up the objects so that he could look at them from behind as they bent over. There were also several reports of the teacher discussing his personal sex life with children and making bizarre comments about how the girls in his class looked “cute”.
Despite New Jersey making laws against “pass the trash” practices, schools flouted the restrictions and hid groomer teachers anyway. Lewd conduct often ends up leading to physical abuse if teachers are not outed right away.
In the past two weeks alone the news feeds have been replete with child abuse cases involving teachers, from Aurora, Colorado to Maricopa County, Arizona to Swainsboro, Georgia to Mount Pleasant, Texas and Detroit, Michigan.
These cases are so frequent they rarely stay in the focus of journalists for more than a few days before the next arrest takes the limelight.
Think your children are safer if the teacher is female? Think again. Among educators arrested for abuse, women make up 30% of cases. This might seem low until we take into account the fact that among all sexual abuse cases nationally, women perpetrate 10% of them. In other words, female school teachers are far above the national average for child abuse.
Hellbound and Down 