If the American Public isn't scared out of its collective mind, it wouldn't be the fault of the media. Between contagious fat and deadly spinach and missing blond girls, it's a wonder any of us leave the house. Especially if we have kids. The latest in this proud tradition is the Associated Press "expose" of the "epidemic" of teachers who sexually abuse their students. I was all ready to sit down and write a full post about this series--since it reeks more of group character assassination than any real news story--but then I happened to notice Melissa's post at Shakesville. I love how she writes wonderful things so I don't have to.
First of all, she rightly takes the reporters to task on their mathematical evidence for "plague" status:
...There are also three million public school teachers in the US, making less than one-tenth of one percent (0.08%) of them among the educators reprimanded in some way for sexual misconduct. (Accounting for the fact that 90% of the offenses are committed by the only 24.9% of teachers that are male, that makes 0.3% of male teachers reprimanded in some way for sexual misconduct.) By way of comparison, "A review by America's Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002." That's 4%—more than ten times the rate of male public school teachers.
She goes on:
If you note that the AP uses "educators" interchangeably with "teachers" when using that 3 million number, but then also notes that the "the cases that the AP found were those of everyday educators—teachers, school psychologists, principals and superintendents among them," it gets a little messier yet. That's more than 3 million "educators," which means an even smaller percentage of them are sexual predators. Less and less plague-like all the time.
After making some excellent points about how American society perpetuates the ol' boy network and loves to blame victims--as well as the absolute uselessness of massive hysteria in trying to make necessary changes--she makes another good observation:
Beyond that, no good—none—will come of ghettoizing teaching as a profession of perverts. We already underfund schools and underpay teachers; there's really no need to make it a less desirable profession, dissuading decent and talented people in yet one more way from choosing teaching as a profession. I can think of no better way to ensure that the schools are filled with creeps and losers than by going on about how the teaching profession is plagued with sickos until no right-minded person would take the job.
That'll be just great for the kids in public school, won't it? We'll really have helped them out.
To my mind, that leads into the larger question of whether an article like this actually had the intention of helping kids in public schools. I hesitate to call it a vast, right-wing conspiracy, but there are fully mobilized forces out there who beat the drum day after day that public schools are bad, that teachers (and especially unions) are part of the problem, and that private and religious schools (not to mention those who homeschool) are the institutions worthy of support, despite their utter lack of that great buzzword, accountability. Who's mandating NCLB testing for private schools and home educators? Nobody.
I admit my bias upfront: I was raised the child of two public school teachers and received stellar public education from kindergarten through bachelors degrees. I am always going to pull for public schools, not just because that's where I'm from but because I think they serve a hugely important purpose. They are meant to be an equalizer, and the more people who get scared away from public schools because of sensationalist crap like this, the harder it's going to be for them to fulfill that mission.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't take the problem of sexual abuse and misconduct seriously. We absolutely should. But the problems in the schools are no worse than in any other sector of society, and we aren't seeing anywhere near the same outcry. Most such abuse occurs in the home, for Pete's sake.
As Melissa concludes:
As I said at the start of this piece, there are smart ways to address the problem of sexual assault—and addressing it wisely and effectively within the specific confines of the public school system is dependent on many of the same precepts of addressing it wisely and effectively anywhere else, starting with education for both students and school staff on precisely what constitutes sexual misconduct and how it should be reported, and including the presence of a well-trained victims' advocate independent from the administration, someone who isn't inclined to make deals with sexual predators out of a sense of fraternity, a sense of obligation to protect the school, or any other reason that doesn't have fuck all to do with justice and safety.
Justice and safety in any school—or workplace, or organization, or even family—are always a top-down proposition. The most important component to protecting people is a willingness to prioritize their protection rationally and steadily—and comprehensively, by creating an environment where everyone is regarded as equals and treated with dignity, where there's no question that an adult touching a little girl's breast is wrong.
Yeah. What she said.