Real Child Abuse

In today's USA Today:

"WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- The exuberant comments were left on a story about a 27-year-old Catholic school teacher accused of raping a 14-year-old.

"Boy, did I go to the wrong schools!" said one. "I wish I had just ONE teacher like this!!!" said another. "I wish it happened to me when I was a teen in grade school," said a third.

It's a sentiment unlikely to be expressed when the perpetrator is a man and the victim a teen or preteen girl. In this case, though, the roles were flipped: the former teacher in court was a woman, Amanda Iles, and her alleged victim a male student at the White Plains school.

It's a double standard brought by society, experts say, to female sex offenders — one that not only minimizes the victimization of young boys, who are left with lifelong emotional scars, but contributes to lighter sentences for the women involved."

There is a problem in our society when we ignore abuse by female teachers on impressionable boys or silently condone this horrible behavior. 

I have previously written on this subject on August 2 in my commentary "Sexual Abuse of Power", wherein I discussed other teachers accused of similar conduct, to wit:

"In the case of Redlands, Ca teacher Laura Whitehurst, she has been found guilty of having sex with three underage boys, one of whom was 14 at the time she started, and has given birth this summer to one of the boys' children. She has been fired from her job.

And finally, an Ohio teacher, Julie Hautzenroeder, has been placed on administrative leave while she faces trial on August 14 for having sex and smoking pot with two underage boys. Her seven year old was asleep at the time."

We were appalled when former Penn State Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky was accused, and then convicted, of abusing and possibly raping so many young boys in his charge. Why? Because it was "homosexual" abuse? To me, it was abuse of his position as a mentor to children in need of a father figure.
 
Similarly, the abuse by some priests, in violation of not only their vows but also of society's laws of unacceptable behavior, for abusing altar boys and in some cases altar girls, really has nothing to do with celibacy, but rather, the fact that if they weren't priests, they would still be sexual predators. We need to understand that many Catholic clergy take their vows seriously and that the Church has a process called "laicization" which allows priests, nuns, brothers and others to be relieved of their vows appropriately.
 
In 2005, Florida teacher Debra Lafave, who had a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old boy, received a sentence of house arrest for three years plus seven years probation. In 2010, Beth Modica, a former Rockland County, N.Y., prosecutor who had sex with two underage boys, was released from state prison after spending just 21 months behind bars.

There are so many other cases which would take pages to outline and discuss. 

Children, boys and girls, need to be protected from sexual predators no matter if they are men or women. And if the predator commits this heinous crime, the punishment needs to be comparable. We can't call it "rape" if the victim is a girl, but treat it as "sexual initiation" if the victim is a boy. In both cases, scars will be left on impressionable children who will carry these views of sex into adulthood. 

And tragically, some of those children will themselves become predators because the issue wasn't addressed properly when they were kids.