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March 20, 2023

I have argued on these pages that the Epstein scandal was a harbinger, and that the normalization of adult-child sexual relations was already in full swing.  Nowhere does this seem to be more evident than in our public schools.

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This past month, Californian elementary school teacher and recently awarded “Teacher of the Year” Jacqueline Ma was arrested and charged with, among other things, three counts of “oral copulation” with a 13-year-old student.  I wish this were an aberration, but all the evidence points to the opposite.

In 2004, a Department of Education report estimated that approximately 10% of public school students will experience sexual misconduct (often unreported) at the hands of an educator by the time they finish high school.  If that percentage has remained steady to today (it has in all likelihood increased), that means that approximately 4.9 million public school students have been sexually abused by their teachers. 

From the 2015–16 to the 2017–18 school years, Department of Education data show a 55% increase in sexual assault in schools to nearly 15,000 annual (reported) incidents.  In 2022, nearly 350 public educators (grades K–12) were arrested for child sex crimes.  That averages to one a day (that we’re aware of), and, as this timeline includes summer breaks, holidays, and weekends, the average is probably higher.

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In Chicago alone, the inspector general has substantiated more than 70 sexual misconduct allegations out of a total of more than 600 complaints in the 2021–2022 school year.  Since 2018, the same office said that policy violations were found in over 300 investigations.  This is out of a total of only 40,000 employees. 

There are laws prohibiting “passing the trash” (i.e., quietly shuffling a known abuser from one school district to another), but application of these laws varies from state to state, with some performing more lenient background checks than others.  USA Today could find only a single instance of school administrators facing criminal penalties for such negligence (and the penalty was a $2,000 fine, community service, and 18 months’ supervision).  This trend is verified by a 2010 GAO study.  Yet teachers’ organizations continue to resist national databases, which could better track sexual predators posing as teachers. 

Two decades ago, the Catholic Church was called out for tolerating and covering up sexual abuse of children by pedophile priests, who likewise were quietly shuffled from parish to parish rather than fired and prosecuted.  The national outcry was deafening.  Investigations were launched.  Movies were made.  Heads rolled.  And rightfully so.

But the rate of sexual abuse by priests doesn’t exceed the rate of sexual abuse by American males in general.  In other words, our kids are in no more danger of being molested by a priest than they are by, let’s say, a plumber or an accountant.  What shocked our collective conscience, beyond the crimes themselves, is that they were covered up by institutions in which the public places its trust to protect our children. 

Nowadays, we have an identical scandal in our public schools, the only difference being that teachers are 100 times more likely to sexually abuse children as are priests.  The numbers speak for themselves.  Approximately 0.1% of Catholics reported sexual abuse by a priest compared to the nearly 10% of public school children who have reported sexual abuse by an educator. 

Or for a more topical comparison, from 2005 to 2019, there have been 104 law enforcement officers arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting.  Of those, only 35 have been convicted.  According to Heather Mac Donald, in 2022, a total of seven allegedly unarmed black people were killed by police officers.  The statistical evidence shows that, on the annual average of 61.5 million people having at least one encounter with an officer, 0.0016% of those encounters end with the officer killing someone.  Of that infinitesimally tiny percentage, 94% were armed, and only 2% were unarmed black men.