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- There was a judge in Canada who (as I remember) dealt with one of these cases, and afterwards publicly stated that he “would like to see” a total re-evaluation of the sentencing guidelines for these sorts of crimes. His reasoning was that even though there was no logocal accounting for the differences, men who commit them usually end up getting drastically longer sentences than women who commit them.
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- There was a judge in Canada who (as I remember) dealt with one of these cases, and afterwards publicly stated that he “would like to see” a total re-evaluation of the sentencing guidelines for these sorts of crimes. His reasoning was that even though there was no logocal accounting for the differences, men who commit them usually end up getting drastically longer sentences than women who commit them.
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Caveat: Teachers having romantic relationships with students is icky and wrong, and should be illegal. And also is illegal.
Teachers spend their days in the company of students, and their meetings with adults are rarer and briefer- in a very real way, kids are the main people teachers see, most of the time. It’s not all that unusual for this to make some teachers a little… odd. They start to see their students as more mature than they are, start to get a little too involved in their lives. For the right kind of unstable person, moving from here to Bad Things is not a very long trip.
Some students develop crushes, or idolize a special teacher. They’ll flatter, bring little gifts, even try to make the kind of moves that they’d make to try to win a girl/boyfriend. That kind of hero-worship can be hard to resist, and the right kind of unstable person will easily forget that the child is too young to take such advances seriously.
Teachers sometimes find it hard to form romantic relationships. The long hours and high stress means that they go home exhausted and cranky to spend the evening grading papers. This is one of the reasons that teachers so often marry other teachers- that’s the only adults they see. The same factors can contribute to much ickier relationships.
I’ve occasionally thought that the high rate of mental illness among teachers could be solved if school boards took an honest look at their working conditions and took some steps to change them, like creating ways to ease the isolation and the sense that no one knows- or cares- what happens in the classroom.
I think there’s some legitimacy to the latter, and there is less of a power differential when it’s older female / younger male than older male / younger female.
Some relatively recent research has also shown that sexual encounters at a young age with older partners tends to be less traumatic and have fewer lasting effects on boys than on girls – often none at all. I don’t have a cite handy, but can try to fetch if anyone’s interested.
Personally, I never heard of such things happening in my school (in Baltimore county), and my husband said he didn’t know of any in his school (in Birmingham, MI) either. Granted, we both graduated over 30 years ago - were people more discreet or did it not happen as much/at all? No idea.
The reason these female teacher/male student stories are getting more publicity now? It’s the Republicans. Yes, it’s true. I heard about it at a secret meeting, several years ago, of the Conservative Foundation for Gender Equity (CFGE). I’m not really supposed to be talking about this, since it was a secret meeting and all that, but what the hell?
The CFGE was organized in response to the success that Liberals and women’s groups have had over the last couple decades in convincing the general public that all men are perverts. Today, thanks in large part to the efforts of the CFGE, the public is beginning to see the truth: all women are perverts, too.
It is the sincere hope of the members of the CFGE that eventually, everybody will realize that everybody is a pervert, and that men and women will finally start to understand and get along with each other.
I know you think she was hot, but do you ever wonder what was wrong with her that she’d find a boy of eleven sexually attractive? No offense to you, but the idea seriously squicks me out. Hell, I feel guilty thinking Elijah Wood is hot, and he’s only three years younger than I am!
I don’t think that older female/younger male abuse is increasing, just that it’s recieving more attention in the media due to cases like Mary Kay Letourneau. There are a bunch of reasons why the abuse is more likely to go unnoticed: males are less likely to report sexual abuse, they’re less likely to see it as a negative thing, they’re seen as having more responsibility in the matter than a girl being abused would, and an older female showing a lot of attention towards a younger boy is much likely to go unnoticed than if the genders were reversed.
I’d probably better preface this with the disclaimer that I used to write about criminal deviance. Ok, on with the show…
Pedophilia comes in all flavors. I recall one investigation into a “boy-love” porn ring in Asia which uncovered traffic in boy-woman porn being run by the same outfit. Whether there was a female market for this stuff, I don’t know. Could be men who found boys and women attractive (many pedophiles are not child-exclusive).
Also, more recently (a year or so ago?) I ran across a thread in a film discussion group in which female teen and adult viewers of the recent Peter Pan film talked about their reactions to their own feelings of attraction to Jeremy Sumpter. Some admitted to being attracted to him even before this film, when he was very young, and being disturbed by those feelings.
Geezer checkin’ in:
It’s been going on a long, long time. I was approached twice by teachers. The first time I was in 8th grade. (1956, Miami, Fl., age 13)
I was kind of a screw-up, and frequently got detention. I guess shit settled to the bottom and the newer teachers got the privilege of sitting with the detention kids after school. Miss Barbara was young and very attractive. One day I was the only detainee and after a while she came and sat on the desk top next to where I was seated. She started all the usual stuff about how I could do better if I’d only try, etc., and I’m thinkin’ “yeah, yeah, same old stuff from a teacher”.
Then she started stroking my hair, running the backs of her fingernails through it, and she suggested that if I’d come over to where she lived, she’d help me with lessons.
Now, I wasn’t ignorant about such things. I was already working through my second steady girlfriend, but I wasn’t ready for Miss Barbara. Something about the situation scared me. I played dumb, shrugged, kept my mouth shut, and she dropped it.
A couple weeks later she stopped me in the hall and outright invited me to her house to “study” on Friday night. I played dumb again, thanked her but told her I took my girlfriend to a dance every Friday night (true) and slipped away. She let it go then and never approached me again.
Fast forward two years and a half years to summer school after 10th grade, in 1958.
Mr. Grimes took a liking to me and invited me to go camping with him after summer school got over. I liked camping and the outdoors, but after talking to him a little while I realized where he was coming from. Once again I played dumb, shrugged him off and that was that. He was easier to get rid of than Miss Barbara had been. Nice guy, but as far as I was concerned he had the wrong equipment.
Later that summer I started thinking about all that, and that’s when I first realized how cruel the fates can be.
If Mr. Grimes had approached me at age 13, I could have shook him off just as easily then as later. If Miss Barbara had happened by when I was 15, I’d have been ready to deal.
But no, they had to come in reverse order!
I think most kids that are approached by teachers or others in authority just shake it off and keep their mouths shut. I never saw the need to tell a parent or another teacher about these things. Maybe these days kids are more aware, parents are more alert, and this sort of thing comes to light much more than it did in the “good old days”.
Anyway, it’s been going on for a while.
Had my 8th grade algebra teacher made advances, I’d have volunteered to stay after school. Van Halen-Hot for Teacher 
Hey, I totally get what your saying here Guin, but she short answer to your question is an emphatic no. This thought process just doesn’t enter into the brain of an 11 yo. boy. At least not me.
Although the incident didn’t go that far at all; I’m wondering how I would have handled this had I NOT found her to be quite the hottie. Especialy if things would have escalated further. I admit, it probably would have F’d me up in the head.
As with many who’ve commented on these stories, both here and elsewhere, one of my thoughts was, “Geez, why couldn’t that have happened to me?”
I suspect many teenage males could absorb the experience without too much psychic damage - or, rather, come out of it perhaps a bit better off. Still, though, I have no doubt you could find a fair number of teenage guys who’d be rattled by the experience.
Conversely, I think there are quite a few females who could handle the experience of being seduced by an older, adult, male just fine. But there’re likely quite a few who’d not digest such an affair so well.
Teenagers are too variable, and I guess we have to design our societal sanctions to protect the lowest common denominator. Heh - tell that to the SEC.
You do have to wonder about the older half of such couplings, though. While I’m not very well read on the subject, it has always seemed to me that ephebophiles (I know it’s been said here many times, but it is taking longer than we thought - ephebophiles are those attracted to post pubescent children, as would be the case with links the posted, as opposed to pedophiles, who are attracted to prepubescent children) would be people who do not handle their personal interactions with their peers with a confidence to their satisfaction, and thus resort to relationships where they can much more easily assume the dominant role.
But then I look at some of these cases, and - Whoa! Some of these women are, in fact, rather hot tarts, described as being every bit competent in their relationships with other adults.
Hmm…,
I think I need to try and factor in some of what FisherQueen said about, in my interpretation, one’s horizons shrinking to fit their environment.
Another thing I’ve read about both ephebophiles and pedophiles is that are often people who were the subjects of a similar relationship when they were the younger half of the couple. I don’t know how to work that in. Development arrested at a point of early gratification, perhaps?
Thanks for y’alls’ replies.
It’s a complex phenomenon, but I don’t know of much evidence to support the idea that people resort to pedo/ephebo-philia (“ephebophilia” when used strictly refers to sexual attraction to pubescent boys, btw, not adolescents of both genders, while “hebephilia” is the term for attaction to pubescent females) because they can’t score with adults.
People who don’t get sexual stirrings from contact with children or young adolescents – that is to say, most folks – simply don’t, and won’t pursue sexual relationships with them no matter what.
There is some evidence, however, that sexual imprinting may be a cause for pedo/ephebo/hebe-philia. Current research doesn’t tend to focus on old-school Freudian fixation, but rather on the kind of imprinting that occurs in many animals before sexual maturity.
Again, I don’t have cites on hand, but can try to fetch if anyone is interested.
If I’m reading you right, Sample, what you’re saying is that imprinting, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of arrested development, is possibly the root cause of the attraction for some of those who sexually pursue post pubescent children?
I’m gonna trust you, for now, on the terminology, as the Internet holds conflicting definitions of the words “hebephilia” and “ephebephilia.” Can you clear that up?
It’s not exactly arrested development, but rather a kind of imprinting, or fixed mental association.
Have you ever seen the famous footage of the researcher who got ducks to follow him around as though he were their mother? It’s related to that, and in a sense to the phenomenon of “lost language” in kids (like Jeannie and Victor) raised in isolation through puberty, who are never able to acquire language.
The theory is that sexual experiences in children with adults or older kids at certain stages of mental development may result in permanent associations in the mind, resulting in sexual arousal to encounters between children and adults.
It’s been a few years since I looked into the research – I haven’t written about criminal deviants for some time – but when I last read up on it, the science was still relatively primitive and murky.
But some recent studies demonstrate that, in men at least, sexual arousal to stimuli is relatively fixed and uncontrollable when considered very broadly, although preferences can and do change with age. So there is some evidence for a period of impressionability, after which things are pretty much set.
As for the terms, here are the etymological roots:
Ephebus: A greek youth on the verge of manhood
Hebe: Goddess of youth and spring, daughter of Zeus and Hera (hence “hebetic”: pertaining to or occurring in puberty)
To clarify re “arrested development”:
This term implies that things just stop progressing. This isn’t accurate according to the imprinting model, which implies that an abberent event creates an association that otherwise woudln’t be there (just as the ducks didn’t think the researcher was their mom because they were inherently disposed to believe it and just never got over it, but rather because the researcher removed the mother and provided them with abnormal stimulus – in other respects they developed normally).
I mention Victor and Jeannie because their tragically sad cases demonstrate the existence of “cut off points”, so to speak, when the mind becomes essentially unable to unlearn and relearn in certain functions. Puberty is often cited as a kind of universal switching point, when it’s possible that many such do-or-die switches are toggled.
Sample, I appreciate your input here, especially on the terminology. I’m completely lost, though, on “Victor and Jeannie.” What’s that?
Victor was an authentic “wild boy” found in France who had no language skills. No one knows at what age he was separated from humans or how, or if he had been abused and then abandoned.
Jeannie was kept in isolation for her entire childhood, mostly tied to a toilet. She also never learned language in any real sense. Hers was one of the most heartbreaking cases I ever read.
Yep. That’s my hometown.
Heh. Crosscommunication.