Why aren’t governments tackling the epidemic of sexual abuse in America’s public schools?

This week the Washington Post ran a long feature about a school police officer in South Carolina who has been accused of several sexual assaults on high school girls. It turns out that more than 200 police officers have been charged with child sexual abuse between 2005 and 2022.

These officers are patrolling schools to prevent mass shootings. But a few bad apples amongst them have been sexual predators. “The Justice Department and many law enforcement agencies and school systems have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out abusive cops,” the Post claims.

The tragic thing is that these allegations come as no surprise. It is just the latest in a steady trickle of stories in the media about sexual abuse in American public schools. No doubt the problem is similar in other countries. The difference is that collecting meaningful information about abuse in schools is far more difficult in the US because of its sheer size and the number of jurisdictions – 50 states plus the District of Columbia and other territories, divided into more than 13,000 school districts.

Three articles by journalist James Varney for RealClearInvestigations highlight a massive problem which emerges from time to time but has never been comprehensively studied. He writes: “For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.”

Lack of data is a consistent problem which seems almost insurmountable. Last year a journalist for Business Insider dug into the issue after he discovered that the public high school which had attended in southern California had become “a stalking ground for child predators”. He concluded that “shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students”.

How many victims?

How many children have been abused in American schools? It’s impossible to put a number on it. A tally of newspaper reports would leave out the teachers and school employees who have been quietly dismissed or who are never reported.

However, Varney writes that “Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.”

Millions? This certainly dwarfs the abuse problem in the Catholic Church, which has been pilloried for shielding abusive clergy from the law.

The key study of the prevalence of sexual abuse in public schools is 20 years old and controversial, but it raises questions which remain unanswered.

In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft, of Hofstra University, was commissioned by the US Department of Education to analyse the extent of sexual abuse in public schools. She relied upon surveys by the data collected for American Association of University Women. Her methodology is not above criticism, but what she found is still being used as a reference point. And it is deeply disturbing.

Shakeshaft found that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 reported unwanted sexual misconduct by school employees. “Misconduct” covered a wide range of behaviours, from jokes to touching to leering to rape. If that percentage is correct, she calculated that “more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade”.

Around the same time, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released the results of an independent study of abuse by clergy. The John Jay Report found that between 1950 and 2002, 10,667 people made allegations that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors.

“So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft said in an interview with Education Week in 2004. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” Presumably she meant the number of victims, not the rate of offending.

The cover-up

Numerous reports have declared that the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse has been worse than the crime itself. The UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, published in 2022, is one amongst many. It found that:

“The protection of personal and institutional reputations above the protection of children was a frequent institutional reaction. Statutory agencies were not informed, perpetrators were ‘moved on’ and there were failures by those in authority to thoroughly investigate allegations. Records about child sexual abuse allegations were not kept.”

When a grand jury released a report on sexual abuse in the state of Pennsylvania in 2018, it said that the Catholic Church had developed “a playbook for concealing the truth”. That report was badly flawed, as Mercator pointed out at the time, but the metaphor is a useful one. American public schools are using that playbook. Amongst educators, it’s called “passing the trash” – abusers are quietly dismissed and allowed to move to another school district where they abuse again.

Billie-Jo Grant, of California Poly State University, an expert on school abuse, told Varney that the federal Department of Education (DOE) “does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students. DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers’ unions and administrators from passing the trash. DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide.”

“Passing the trash” is “a shockingly frequent phenomenon in America’s public schools,” according to a 2023 study by the Defense of Freedom Institute. It also cites research by Billie-Jo Grant in which she found that abusive teachers will be passed to three different school districts before they are fired or charged by police and can have as many as 73 victims.

There are laws on the books to ban this practice, but they are ineffective. Activists are lobbying for model legislation called the SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation) Act. Progress has been slow; only a handful of states have passed it.

The common thread

Outrage over abusive clergy and cover-ups by bishops in the Catholic Church is understandable. The Church sets the moral bar high for its faithful and they deserve to have exemplary pastors. The vast majority of priests are, and have always been, upright and decent men and in recent years the incidence of abuse has declined sharply. But the scandal of predatory priests, negligent bishops and the ruined lives of children cries out to heaven for vengeance. The Church’s tarnished reputation may be part of its atonement for these offences.

However, it is incomprehensible that public school systems in the United States and other countries, like Australia and the UK, have learned nothing from that disaster and are not scrutinised with the same vigour. This negligence makes one suspect that most governments, federal and state, are more interested in weakening Christian churches than they are in protecting students. This places children at risk. As one activist told Varney, “we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”

It’s not just a question of fairness. Over the past few decades, an epidemic of child sexual abuse has swept through institutions in Western countries, from churches to the Boy Scouts to public schools. The Catholic Church is definitely not an outlier. There may be a deep cultural problem in our society which we are afraid to face – we no longer understand what our powerful sexual drives are for. As a consequence, they are flailing about like live electric wires and innocent children get burnt.

Until governments come to grips with this and stop using churches as whipping boys, the problem will continue unabated and millions of children will be hurt.

Have you had any experience with sexual abuse in government schools?

AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.