Sex with students is rarely "romantic" or "an affair" as many Harlequin Romance-smitten headline writers are apt to call it.
Sex with students is sordid and manipulative and even a starry-eyed reporter would have a hard time reading the Underlying Facts and Circumstances document for Rebecca Bogard (found at this news story) and not call it was it is - sexual exploitation.
Exploitation defined:
"To exploit someone is to make use of him or her for one's own ends by playing on a weakness or vulnerability. Those with power have the inherent potential to exploit those without power. A manipulative educator can exploit a student's respect, innocence, naivete, need for affection, insecurity, or low self-concept." - Robert J. Shoop, "Sexual Exploitation in Schools: How to Spot It and Stop It." p 7Most people recognize that paying starving wages to an illegal alien is exploiting his vulnerability and fear of deportation. When the aid worker in Africa holds out the offer of food in exchange for sex, it's the same bargain. When a teacher has sex with a student the educator has the same defense and delusion.
Many of these educators think that they were the ones being taken advantage of, as one teacher who sent us two long e-mails this week seems to believe. Posters, mostly students and family members who defend popular teachers, frequently say that the teenager (age 17, 18, 16, 15, 14, whatever) threw herself at the teacher. A pedophile feels the same about a six-year-old because they find the child seductive, not faulting their own twisted mental processes that this should be so for him.
Twenty-something, thirty-something, forty-something teachers aren't suitable sexual partners for schoolchildren. Period. That they should think so and act on the impulse isn't a mental disorder. It's a lack of self-control, an almost total absence of moral values, mixed with a heady taste of authority. Once caught, they refer to sex crimes with minors as "mistakes." So does the pedophile.
Mistakes are what children do when they touch hot stoves because they lack experience or information. Educators know that sex with students is illegal. There is not a single teacher in this country who hasn't been informed of this fact. Not one. They just don't care.
When a grown man walks into a courtroom and hopes for probation after having been convicted of five statutory rape and two assault charges, it means that our laws and the promised consequences have no deterrent effect. The girl was 13-years-old. He has another trial scheduled in July for sex with a 16-year-old. For each rape charge he can expect to serve two years except - of course - if the judge decides that he will serve the sentences concurrently or if he gets time off for good behavior. Or if he gets an early parole. A good lawyer will assure him that it is unlikely that he will do more than a year and a half.
If you planned, actively planned, to commit a sex offense, you could do no worse than become a teacher. Rarely is anyone afforded such easy access to children without supervision, have such a tolerant employer as school districts who will allow you to resign at the first sign of trouble or just not renew a contract, which will allow you to misbehave in as many as four or five schools before you are arrested. When you are caught, a union-supplied lawyer will defend you at no expense to yourself, and archaic and insane labor laws mean that even if you are convicted, you might not lose your license and livelihood.
As the DirectTV woman says in the ad, "How sweet is that?"
