Golly, am I glad there isn’t a common element to all of these Public School Teacher Sex Abuse cases!

(UPDATE, June 17, 2015) – Since we’ve seen a plethora of similar news stories since I originally penned the article below (for some examples, just take a peek at Robert Stacy McCain’s site), we’re re-posting this oldie from waaaay back in 2012. 

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I am so glad that our Media is on the job, investigating stories, connecting the dots on complex or seemingly unrelated issues so that we can see the Big Picture.

That’s why, since I haven’t heard anything to the contrary, I just know that the following stories are each completely distinct with no overarching commonalities. They’re just a series of unpleasant-yet-random incidents.

Uh-huh:

• Sixth grade teacher charged with having sex with 12-year-old boy
• Clifton High School teacher accused of having sex with student indicted
• Middle school teacher had ‘sex and pizza party with underage students where she plied them with drugs and alcohol’
• In California, a Livingston High School teacher faces felony sex charges over ‘relationship’ with 15 year-old student

And there’s more; a LOT more:

• Brooklyn English Teacher accused of having sex with student in school
• Claremore (Okl.) choir teacher arrested for rape, sodomy of victim under 16
• A former middle school teacher in Tennessee pleaded guilty to performing sex acts on 10 students, some of which occurred in the classroom
• In July of this year, a New York gym teacher was recently found guilty of molesting a girl for years, up until she was in 5th grade.

Depressingly, there are literally dozens and dozens and dozens additional such stories.

This year.

These were all just in 2012.

Now before you start waving your arms and saying something like, “Hey, JTR! Am I crazy, or do all of those stories have to do with Public School Teachers and underage students?”, let me assure you: “You’re crazy”.

Otherwise, our press would have HAD to have seen it, too, and would have been reporting on this like mad.  They’re not, so obviously all those stories do not actually have anything to do with teachers, or with people who “like” kids going into the teaching profession so as to have easy access to kids. And even if that IS the case, it’s a coincidence. Just dozens  hundreds  thousands of …unrelated coincidences.

Obviously.

‘Cause if there WAS a common element throughout these incidents, how could anyone explain something like this not actually becoming a real story:

“In the first three months of 2012, the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District received 248 complaints of sexual misconduct involving school employees, a 35 percent increase over the same period last year.”

See? There can’t be anything to hundreds of sexual misconduct complaints in one city’s school system, in a three-month period, this year. You’d have heard about that. Right?

For some more background as to why this is so obviously “not” a horrific, wide-spread problem that is being actively and aggressively swept under a rug the size of Argentina, here’s a CBS story from 2009:

“…Consider the statistics: In accordance with a requirement of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002 the Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the school system.

Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.

“[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?” she said. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a “Nationwide Teacher Molestation Cover-up” and by asking “Are Ed Schools Producing Pedophiles?”

No, they didn’t. That treatment was reserved for the Catholic Church, while the greater problem in the schools was ignored altogether.

As the National Catholic Register’s reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.

Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools…” 

Someone not so sanguine as me might have a different take on all this, of course. THAT person might be tempted to question the media. THAT person might doubt the integrity of people who love to remind us that they exist to ask the ‘tough’ questions, and that they have no agenda, and just go “where the story leads them”.

THAT person might ask why, when the evidence should lead them to realizing that there seems to be a lot of, umm, “extra-curricular activity” going on between teachers and the children entrusted to their care, we get …nothing.

Why?

On what planet is this not a story? Was “have sex with student” part of these teacher’s lesson plans?

What were they studying, …’Caligula‘???

Now since that obviously is not me, all I can say is: *whew*, I’m comforted. I find tremendous solace in knowing that there isn’t a massive, corrupt, twisted problem concerning hundreds and hundreds of teachers having sex with thousands of underage students, (who also just happen to be our sons and daughters, by the way), across the country, every year. It’s wonderful to know that there’s no over-arching story to be discovered here; no connecting of the dots needed or warranted.

Gosh, is THAT a relief.