“[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” – Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft
“Of children in 8th through 11th grade, about 3.5 million students (nearly 7%) surveyed reported having had physical sexual contact from an adult (most often a teacher or coach). The type of physical contact ranged from unwanted touching of their body, all the way up to sexual intercourse.”
Recently the extent of the problems in the Chicago schools have become public, and administrators frequently ignored reporting requirements:
The report said the district had investigated more than 450 allegations of adult sexual misconduct against students. Misconduct was found in nearly half of those cases. But since there was no systematic effort to track the problem, officials didn’t even know how bad things were. . . Some predators went undetected or unpunished throughout this time, and some serious offenders were able to get jobs in other school districts,” the report states.
I have seen very little in the national media about this issue. Why is that?
In many cases teachers or other school employees are allowed to find jobs in other schools even when administrators recognize that abuse is occurring. I have yet to find a case of school administrators facing criminal prosecution or even disciplinary actions for failure to follow state or federal reporting requirements. What is going on here?
1 Do not use media reprts of abuse to try and say media ignores abuse.
2 The we are not that bad because they do it to is never a good defense for sexual assault especially with children.
3 if you are going to point to another group go with parents or step parents or other family members because they tend to make up a larger amount of the cases.
Abuse is terrible regardless of who the abuser is. The point is that the national media has ignored massive abuse by teachers and other adults in public schools. That abuse has affected millions of children.
The quote from CBS is more than a decade old. The statistics about the numbers of abuse are from a website that deals with abuse, and the Chicago reports are from local news media there.
Can you point to recent reports in the national media about epidemic of sexual abuse by adults in public schools?
Is abuse only newsworthy if the abuser has a clerical collar?
There are 1.22 million active duty servicemen. That means that a 0.9% abuse rate corresponds to just under 11,000 men. And that is just in one year.
My observation is that reporting sexual abuse of males in the military does not fit with the agendas for promoting gays and women in the military, there is no interest in reporting the statistics.
What are the rates compared to the general population? That’s what tells you if it’s a military specific problem, or just a “some people are bad” problem. It’s a problem either way.
