Protecting offenders at school
Well, I’m back from vacation … and I want to make sure this first post back is a bit meaty …
Let me start by saying that it is not intended to be any sort of defense of the acts of some priests against children. However, it does aim to put the scandal of recent years into some perspective.
While reading our local paper yesterday, I happened across a tiny blurb about a teacher/tutor accused of sexual misconduct with a student she was tutoring. The “headline” was in a quite small — though bold — font. The article took up about a 3″ x 3″ square. Easily missed. Nothing like the front, or near-front, page stories of priest sexual misconduct, which almost always includes multiple paragraphs rehashing old news, as though such events were related.
Some may say “so what? It’s a big problem that deserves attention.”
But, teacher misconduct with students is a larger, more widespread problem. So much so that the federal government has studied it extensively and created literature on it. The latest search of Google News on teacher and sex returns 2,100 hits.
The facts of the matter is that stats confirm that 1 in 10 students will be a victim of sexual misconduct by a school official between kindergarten and 12th grade. An article in May 2006’s Crisis magazine highlights how deep the problem is — as well as showing how the government protects school districts from the type of lawsuits now bankrupting Catholic dioceses.
One should recall how the laws were changed and interpreted in the case of the priest abuse scandal, to allow the greatest amount of damage to be done to the Church as a whole. But, nothing is done about the limitations in place to protect school districts. Why not?
Is it because the diocese ignored the problem and, in some cases, moved priests to other places? As can be read in the Crisis magazine article, this has also been found to occur in the public school system, as teachers are let go and move to other school districts.
[M]ost incidents of public school educator sexual misconduct with children “are not entered into criminal justice information systems, and abusers are generally subject only to informal personnel actions within the relative privacy of the [public school] administration.†As just one example, she cited “a study of 225 cases of educator sexual abuse†in a major metropolitan area where “only 1 percent [of offending teachers] lost their teaching credentials.â€
Terri Miller, a single mother and president of SESAME—Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, a national, public school equivalent of the clergy-abuse victims’ group SNAP—offered similar testimony to the Colorado General Assembly this spring. Quoting data that suggest a much higher incidence of sexual abuse in public schools when compared with the Catholic priesthood, Miller pointed to one of the teachers in her daughter’s public school in Nevada who had been dismissed only when authorities belatedly discovered his long history of sexual misconduct at schools in Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere in Nevada. The teacher was never reported or punished, but rather allowed to move freely from one job to the next.
The situation among priests and teachers are both tragic … but the system is largely ignorning the greater problem that is occurring in our public school system.
[tags]sexual abuse, scandal, school, law, prejudice, catholic, church[/tags]
[...] A weekend article appearing on Catholic Exchange, Protecting Catholic Kids from Unsafe “Safety”, makes known the recent document from the US Bishops which gives parent the power to remove their kids from the mandated “Safe Environments” programs in their dioceses. Some of these programs have been widely criticized for the mature subject matter it sets before very young children, and parents have been vocal about not wanting their children to be forced to participate. It is sad that it has come to this … and it is not simply because of the actions of some priests against children, but has become necessary because of an increase in the “sexuality” of our culture, and the decline in the valuation of the human person. As I said in another post from a few weeks ago, children are more at risk in the public school system by far, than they are at risk anywhere else. But, the only answer should not be to protect our kids from their environment. As a society, we need to work to change the environment. Why shouldn’t our children be able to be children? Why should we need to force them to deal with adult issues at such a young age? Some may call me naive, but I can recall back to the “innocence” of my youth (yes, the memory still serves ) and I know I’m not alone when I say that I yearn for that for my children. I want them to enjoy their childhood as children. I don’t want them to have to worry about situations where they should be able to trust. But, the cold, hard reality is that I have to watch my children closely. I have to be careful if I’m out with my 5-year old daughter and she has to use the bathroom. I cannot take her into the men’s room, and I cannot go with her into the women’s room … so I have to cautiously send her into the restroom alone, while I worry outside the door, making sure that no one is lying-in-wait in a stall. Shopping can even be a challenge, as it is possible for someone to snatch or grope one of my children from between the clothes’ racks at the local JcPenney if they lag just a few steps too far behind me, and I take my eyes off them. This is not the world that any of us—not our children, not I, and not you—should have to live in. And, we sit and talk about the high price of gas, or the war, or the economy or our portfolios. However, when it comes to other moral issues, that affect the environment in our society, we will say “it’s a women’s choice”, ignoring the discussion of what the woman is being allowed to choose; or “let them be with whomever they love”, without concern for the unintended implications of such an ideology, or “kid will have sex, no matter what, so you better teach them to protect themselves by giving them easy access to condoms and teaching them to use them”. Let’s get concerned over the changing the environment that we have to live in, instead of just figuring out ways to protect ourselves from the dangers of that environment. Let’s stop eschewing the notion that there should be no standard of conduct in our communities, because when we look closely at it, we find that the standards have much more agreement upon people than many are willing to admit. Technorati Tags: catholic, bishops, safe environment, protect, children, parenting, school, catholic exchange, society, change [...]
CatholicSphere » Better ways to protect our kids said this on July 10th, 2006 at 2:10 pm