[Note: some details in some of my personal recollections were changed in order to avoid even the slight prospect of doxxing anyone. If you think I’m talking about that person, I’m not.]
It is common to hear critics of homeschooling point out that children kept at home all day are isolated from adults who might witness family abuse, and thus, one important function of schools, especially public schools, is to act as a kind of watchdog for kids who might be mistreated by their parents. There’s a kind of logic to this, but of course it begs the question of whether children are generally safer in the care of unrelated adults employed by the state than in their own homes. Despite what most people might assume, this is not a question that gets a lot of attention from researchers, but this is not as strange as it might at first appear. There are things we all agree it is more polite not to know.
I came across this story in RealClearInvestigations this morning that sheds some light on the issue; do read it in full. The author of “Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress” is one James Varney, an experienced researcher who has previously written for the Washington Times.
Varney writes that while stories about teachers abusing students are common in the media, and that the public has a particular fascination with female teachers and young male students (more on that later), little is actually done to create a big picture understanding of the scope of the problem of teacher-student sexual predation (I use that term as the best descriptor I can think of; while some of these relationships are technically legal due to variations in age-of-consent laws in different states, it is always an adult taking advantage of the inexperience and youth of another). Varney notes:
Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.
Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.
For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.
This is all shockingly true but the fact is that they don’t really have to fight that hard to keep the truth hidden. The parties noted above aren’t answering questions because by and large the public is not really asking. To be sure, when there is a major scandal or some crime comes to light, there is a show of interest, but it typically dies down quickly. A quick Google search on my part revealed that two teachers were arrested in the same county in the same week in New Jersey for multiple acts of sexual assault. Despite their being women, there are no particular ancillary salacious details like secret OF pages or anything (the Daily Mail surely would have noted this), so I am confident the story will shortly disappear, along with any interest in probing deeper.
The abuse in those cases went on for more than a year and one involved a special needs student. Having worked in schools for many years, I can assume with confidence that the relationships, such as they were, were widespread knowledge among the students and that at least some staff must have known about them. I can also predict that they were not the only ones, and I would go so far as to say that I would be more surprised if a school didn’t have that problem than shocked at the revelation of one. The ugly truth is that such things are more common than the public imagines, or wants to imagine.
I cannot speak as to how sexually charged workplaces are in general. My last long-term employment before teaching was in the hospitality industry, which is a wretched hive of scum and villainy that’s perhaps not representative. I once came upon my drunken supervisor in the beverage department sitting in his boxers ogling the cocktail waitress and his own topless sister while they cavorted in the outdoor hot tub with a roadie at 7:00 AM, all under the gaze of the breakfast diners in the overpriced restaurant three floors up. The staff referred to our gay manager as Deadliest Catch (because he’d caught everything deadly), but despite an inventory of malignant social diseases that required him to carry a literal tacklebox full of pills he never missed a chance to act as a one man viral vector at every pride event. It was that kind of place.
Ironically, he didn’t want crabs.
Schools, in my experience, are more sedate- being filled with better educated people more mindful of their investment in their careers- but still full of various carryings-on. Among the adults there is a fair amount of running around. But unlike nearly all other workplaces, schools are also places where adults spend large amounts of time with kids. And this brings its own problems.
Outright pedophilia in schools, adults preying on pre-pubescent children, is rare, though probably less-so than most people think. Screening procedures aren’t wholly ineffectual (though I did once hear a story from an LEO in charge of background checks about a man accused of triple-murder who’d been found not guilty by reason of insanity, who was hired fresh out of the asylum at a middle school, working there without incident for some months until the background check noticed that the ‘institute’ he had left was not educational). Pedos also aren’t especially good at hiding their proclivities and the ones that slip through the cracks tend to make themselves conspicuous creeping out the mostly female staff at the elementary level. In any case, teachers of younger children tend to have less one-on-one time with them and there are more staff floating around watching everything.
My experience is with high school students, and this is generally where most of the abuse shows up in the news. Apart from what I’ve read about in the media and classes I’ve taken, I’ve worked at several schools, public, charter, and private, and witnessed such incidents at every stop. I’ve seen people fired and get arrested, but most of the time, incidents between teachers and students are handled quietly and quickly; one day Mr. Friendly is teaching biology, the next his name is off the classroom door, and few connect it to Becky’s sudden transfer to the school down the road. There are various reasons for this, but they generally come down to the administration having some idea what is going on but no way to prove it, and cut off future problems (and expensive liabilities) before it reaches the stage of mandated reporting. They move once they know enough not to want to know more. Egregious cases involving actual physical assault are generally the only ones where the police are always called.
But perhaps strangely, at least to me, is that more often than not these incidents are met with indifference with the families involved. At one school near where I worked, the assistant basketball coach (also a teacher) was involved with a girl who had been a junior when the abuse began. Fall of her senior year he was fired and arrested under circumstances I was not fully privy to, but the girl remained at the school. That spring, now 18 and a legal adult, she took up with another teacher, who happened to be the married older brother of a fellow student there. He left his job, his wife, and his newborn baby to be with her, and as she was the valedictorian (I’m not kidding) she got to address the student body with her new fiancé in the audience, and posed for pictures with him and his child from his former wife. No one at the school or the community commented on this to my knowledge, despite them all being active in local churches and it being a relatively small town.
As David Lynch has so masterfully portrayed, and Edgar Lee Masters before him, communities have dark undercurrents where all sorts of deviancy flourishes, coming into the light only occasionally and without anyone wishing to investigate. People in that small town moved on from that uncomfortable spectacle just like the residents of big cities ignore flashers and subway-defecators. You could ask why it happens, but that would only lead to places you prefer not to think about that deeply. In the case of schools, it mostly brings to mind the most awkward period of our lives, and the emotions and uncertainty of it all.
Lynch’s work inspired the creation of this popular restaurant chain. It has lots of symbolism and onion rings.
To this day, a quarter-century and some change on, I still remember a particular substitute, Miss Mitchell (it might have been ‘Mrs.’ but I prefer to remember her single). Miss Mitchell was a dark-haired, buxom woman of perhaps 30, whose preference for short-shorts and tank tops I would today, as a former department head, regard as a bit much, but at 16 I considered an inspired fashion choice. She always had my full and rapt attention, and that of every other boy in the room, though I would venture that none of us could exactly recall anything she ever said. Despite the conspicuous attention she received, and more than a few comments from some of the bolder youths that would today get one sent to sensitivity boot camp, Miss Mitchell was a professional and to my knowledge never abused the very obvious sexual power she had over the boys in her charge. But for all that, it was there. It only just occurred to me to wonder what the girls in the class must have thought.
Sort of like young Marisa Tomei, but with spaghetti straps and cotton exercise shorts.
Teaching is a lot of things. Done well, or even poorly, it makes great demands on the mind. It’s intensely emotional, both on the teachers’ part and in dealing with hormonal young people only just emerging from their childish solipsism. And it’s profoundly lonely. People don’t often think about that part, but even though you’re surrounded by people all day you are constantly made aware of the distance between you and them, and from a wider society. Teachers know that whatever people say, the world holds them in contempt, that the sort of person who spends all day with kids and worksheets really is a sort of loser without better prospects.
These factors all play into making the weird little world that is a school what it is, and it doesn’t take much for dysfunction to manifest. Left unchecked, it can make for an entire institutional culture of abuse. But there is another side to it, one which can actually be conducive not only to the immediate success of the school, but the wider prospects of education. First, though, I should mention how the predation manifests itself.
There are three basic types of adults who seek out relationships with teenaged students. Note that I use the word ‘relationship’ only in the most clinical sense; I do not intend at all to lend these interactions any kind of romantic legitimacy. Also, these are generalizations and variations and blends of the types are possible. The first are the ones I call simply, ‘Creeps.’ Creeps just want sex. They are the simplest and most common type. They tend to be overwhelmingly male, though there are female Creeps. Some Creeps are indiscriminate and will engage with adult women or girls without much preference, but others purposely seek out teenagers as easy to coerce and dominate. Generally, both subtypes gravitate towards girls with obvious body image or family issues, and will maintain multiple relationships at the same time. The assistant coach I mentioned was of this type; he had also been dating a female coach at the school at the same time he was abusing the teen girl.
The second type are the ‘Jon Snows.’ These tend to be more heavily female. I use the term Jon Snow to indicate people who hit the wall and brood, and this type does exactly that. This is the “hot teacher has sex with her male student and everyone says niiiiice because we don’t want to think of it as the abuse it actually is” character from a thousand salacious news stories. These accounts get more interest because generally the women are hot, or plausibly once were. And that’s their impetus for predation.
Abuse… like what Season 8 did to his character…
She spent the better part of her young life getting tons of male attention, got married to a jock or some bro equivalent, and planned to teach for the usual five years, have kids, and stay at home botoxing and clotheshorsing her way through a life spent documented by way of smiling pictures on social media. But something went wrong and she ended up stuck in her job for far too long. It’s probable that the husband turned out to be a dud and either wouldn’t or couldn’t fund her lifestyle on a single income. His drinking that she thought was so fun when they were dating is now a full-time pursuit, and his propensity to flirt is far less cute when it’s directed at the babysitter. If she worked in an elementary school she would probably start an affair with the principal or some equivalent, but in high school she still gets all the attention she craves from a captive audience; the same sorts of toned lettermen who once found her so appealing still do, it turns out. The first woman from the New Jersey story is of that type. They tend to like boys who are equal parts popular and dumb and athletic; if she goes for a gamma, she’s probably grooming him to kill her loser husband.
Don’t act like you wouldn’t at least consider shooting Matt Dillon for her…
The third type is the ‘Tragic Poet’ and is the rarest and most dangerous. As I noted above, teaching is a lonely job, and it’s even lonelier if you actually care about it. Imagine devoting your life to the study of English literature, getting a job teaching it, and being thrilled for exactly the twelve minutes it takes before you realize that no one else gives a crap and never will. The kids, their parents, the administrators- none of them actually value anything you care about, even though they’re paying you and sending their kids to sit in your class for years. It’s a hard lesson to learn and some people never quite get over it. And this can have disturbing consequences when said teacher finally does meet that one in a million kid who actually does want to know more about Harper Lee.
In his mind, the tragic poet isn’t like the other predators. He or she (they’re no more likely to be one or the other) isn’t after something as base and sordid as sex- no, he and the girl with the spiral notebook journal really connect on an intellectual level. They get each other. And that’s why their relationship isn’t weird or wrong, and why the idiot philistine world will never understand them. No one rationalizes like a Tragic Poet and thus no one else is more insidious. The Creeps and Jon Snows understand on some level that they’re taking advantage of kids; the Tragic Poet genuinely believes he’s found a soulmate.
What all three have in common is something at once particular to them and characteristic of our times. They feed off of youth. They work where they do because they need access to that vital energy, that promise and potential that has ebbed out from their own lives. And this is the deeper reason such crimes so repulse us that we refuse to inquire into their scope, more so even than the reminder they bring to mind of the fears and dangers of our own youth. In the broader sense, our society does the same thing as these degenerates; young people are ground away while the promise of adulthood, houses and meaningful work and self-sufficiency is pilfered from them and hoarded by those who cling to whatever facets of youth they can. Everyone hates old age, none more so than the aged, so rather than a healthy system in which the elderly are venerated and the youth guided into adulthood, everyone works as hard as they can to simulate youth in the same way processed foodstuffs simulate nature. It’s why pedophilia is the last taboo; the outright rape of children is too on-the-nose for a society that has otherwise abandoned every Christian sanction regarding sexual morality. And it’s why once the news goes off, we all pretend that our schools are where kids go to learn about math and history, rather than places where they are indifferently supervised to safeguard their future economic potential while the grown-ups work for new toys, but are occasionally (and not so occasionally) fed upon. It’s no coincidence that the vampire, along with Frankenstein, are the characteristic new monsters of the modern age. One feeds on the young to maintain the illusion of youth, the other is a perversion of life made possible through science.
There is another way. Education is intimately bound up with Eros. Aristotle noted that it consists of teaching young people to love what they ought to love. It’s fundamentally about the orientation of affections. To learn, we have to love that which we pursue. And in that, I think there is very much a place for teachers and students to fall in love- not with one another, obviously- but with the same thing at the same time. When I teach, I first of all hope to convey whatever love my students feel for me to that love’s proper object, most immediately the subject at hand, but ultimately to God. Their potential and promise do not belong to me, no matter what use I would make of it, nor to a world that merely wants them to keep the widgets flowing for grandpa’s margarita fund, but to that end which God has in mind for them. I’m their custodian, and I’ll be judged on what I did with the confidence placed in me by everyone, but especially the children, about whom it was said that it would be better to have a millstone around my neck than abuse them.
Gen-Z apparently has Mx. Mitchell to look forward to.
I would say that teachers as a whole are not very esteemed, which is due to a lot of things, while individuals’ mileage may vary.
I suspect that pedos could fly under the radar a bit more easily back then, given the lack of awareness of the scope of the problem. As for the Tragic Poet drama teacher, they tend to gravitate toward English and the arts, but I’ve noticed a few in science. History almost never gets them, as it’s populated by coaches who, when they go bad, are almost invariably Creeps, with the occasional Jon Snow.