Teacher Accused of Sleeping With Student Not Anomaly


"Lafave is not alone, according to the study, "Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature June 2004," prepared for the U.S. Department of Education (search) by Charol Shakeshaft of Hofstra University and Interactive, Inc. Huntington, N.Y."

This Long Island professor was mentioned by the Catholic League in their special report on Sexual Abuse in Social Context: Catholic Clergy and Other Professionals. I especially like the quotes about her report from this World Net Daily article:

"She notes the recently released study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops found 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests from 1950 to 2002.

She compares that with her extrapolation from a national survey for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000, which would indicate roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee from 1991 to 2000."

"That is a single decade, she points out, compared to the approximately five decades covered by the Catholic report."

And here is the kicker:
"Initially, Shakeshaft understood the report was to lay the groundwork for a broad national study on sexual abuse in schools, but last May she was told to retool the report and officials say they have no more plans at the moment to study the issue."

A few things need to be said:

- the problems within the Catholic Church should have led to a real national push to end abuse of children, but some prejudice was involved that kept people from seeing how much wider a scandal child abuse really is in society.

- Priests are held to a higher standard, either because of prejudice or because people understand the nature of the priesthood. For Catholics, Priests should be held to the highest standard.

- I don't believe that the coverups, and shifting around of abusers was as great in schools as it was in the Church.

- I thought the national study going to 1950 in the Church was overkill but anything to clean out the rot is fine. The same should be done with the public school systems.

- The Church is better today because of the two year and ongoing "enema" so let the public school system, athletic organizations, military, and other groups experience some of this cleansing.