15 is not a child, but 15 is not a fully-developed adult either. One’s body might be close to fully-developed at 15, but not the brain. It’s wrong because of the age factor, and also because of the authority role factor.
I don’t know if there has been a study, but I know that most of my male classmates would gladly have volunteered to participate in one when I was in high school.
There really are two different things going on here:
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Does it hurt the kid (male teenager).
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Do we need to forbid it simply because we don’t want teachers having sex with their students, EVEN IF NO ONE IS “HARMED”.
I’m of the opinion that the answer to #2 is “YES”, so in a sense it really doesn’t matter what the answer to #1 is.
To me, the issue is not the harm caused by sex in and of itself, but the power differential combined with the risks that come with sex.
All other things equal, a teenaged boy will have a harder time refusing the advances of an adult in a position of power than he will a female peer. He will also have a harder time asserting himself if the adult insists on unprotected sex. She says she’s on the pill? If a teacher says it, well, that means it’s true, right? Students are taught to accept the word of teachers. They are less skeptical of their claims because teachers are treated as trusted authorities. The power differential makes it that more likely he was act against his own best interest. If the teacher becomes pregnant, then suddenly you have a teenaged father. I think we can all agree this potential outcome can be harmful to a kid who otherwise would have delayed parenthood and all the stress and responsibilities that come with that until full maturity.
Sure, when you poll men and ask them if they would have been damaged by having sex with a teacher, they will probably say no. But that’s the wrong question to ask.
It’s a fairly long-winded version of “no u”.
[QUOTE=Muffin]
Hines and Finkelhor’s literature reviewfrom the poll thread.
[/QUOTE]
Thanks for this, although perhaps not everyone will appreciate you actually answering the question of the OP.
Are such relationships always damaging? No. Are they sometimes damaging? Yes. Do they tend to involve people on both sides who are damaged already? Yes. Do they often involve power disparities? Yes. Is the research clear? No.
Are there tantrums when conventional sexual morality receives any kind of support on the SDMB? Yes.
Regards,
Shodan
[Edited due to my own misunderstanding. ]
The evidence already cited suggests that most men who have had consentual statutory rape experiences look back on them positively, and there seems to be only modest evidence for negative outcomes.
Apparently women are more likely to experience negative outcomes. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that individual differences exist, so that even for women, harmful outcomes are not universal.
Do not misperceive me as advocating for statutory rape, nor for advocating for any changes to current laws.
For girls 16 or 17, I don’t think (based on my reading of the Guttmacher study I linked to in the other thread) that harmful outcomes even happen in the majority of cases.
What word would that be?
The problem isn’t whether it’s wrong or not, it’s whether it’s typically damaging or not, and whether it’s less damaging or less commonly damaging for boys than for girls.
Has anyone read this thing? If so, could someone please sum it up, preferably á la Cecil, for those of us too lazy to read it in full?
Possibly whatever damage is done is at least partly due to how society views the teen. We see a lot if envy and “good for you” aimed at teen boys who got a leg over the hot teacher, while a teen girl is immediately viewed as a teen slut, a tease, or at best a victim to be pitied when caught out with a male teacher. The boy got lucky, the girl damaged a good teacher’s reputation. How you are treated after it all comes to light has to have some effect on how you view yourself. As a teen, you don’t usually have a very well developed self image and you are very vulnerable to outside input.
Yes, I have read it. No, I will not sum it up, for it is a literature review, meaning that it is a summary of the research out there that specifically references the research that it is summarizing.
If you want a summary, read it. If you want to dig down into the research, read the research it references and summarizes.
Two words, actually: “You fail.”
Haven’t read the full .pdf just yet, but the bit most directly relevant for the OP seems to be this one:
The “King et. al.” study sounds especially interesting, since it seems to deal with the measurable effects on the affected males (which is what the OP is asking about), rather than their self-reported view of their early sexual experiences with female adults.
Caveat: I don’t know if the adolescent males were studied while still in their youths, or over a longer period of time. If someone knows the answer, feel free to chime in.
“Ruin his life” might be a little hyperbolic if we’re talking about the possibility of failing a class. But I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, anyway. The weird thing about this situation is it turns the power dynamic around. The teacher is the one whose life will be more damaged if the affair becomes public. Threatening to fail the kid seems like a pretty dumb move. If anything, it seems much more likely that he will receive an easy A.
I wonder what you mean by “measurable” effects. Self-report is quite measurable. Further, weren’t the other outcomes reported there obtained by self-report?
Interpreting the differences in other outcomes reported in the King et al., 2003 paper is problematic given that it appears that their sample was recruited from among men calling into a suicide hotline. Thus, men with adolescent consensual but statutory rape experiences who did not call into a suicide hotline would not have made it into that study.
I think the suggestion is not that the teacher might fail the boy after they’ve had sex, but that she might fail the boy if he declined to have sex (or that he might fear that she might) - therefore, the power imbalance between them is such that even his ostensible consent can’t be assumed to be freely given.
Exactly.
Yeah, had a feeling my English skills were failing me there - couldn’t quite find the right terms, and ended up with something rather fuzzy.
My idea was that having the afflicted males themselves “rate” their experience as either “positive,” “neutral” or “negative” might not tell the entire story. There might be a non-zero chance that in at least some cases, due to pride or shame or cultural expectations or what have you, a guy might rate the experience as “positive,” even though in fact it helped turn him into a nervous suicidal alcoholic wreck.
However! I can now see that the title of the King et. al. paper seems to suggest that, yep, they did indeed get their sample from fellas calling suicide hotlines. In that case, the answer to the OP seems to be as follows:
From Hines and Finkelhor’s literature review, we only know of studies dealing with how the afflicted males “rate” their experience. (A majority rate it as positive; a third rate it as neutral; about five percent rate it as negative.) However, Hines and Finkelhor mention no proper studies dealing with long-term psychological or behavioural effects. If such studies exist, they are yet to be mentioned in this thread.
I hope that was all at least a little bit clearer.
I realize there is some controversy regarding this, but as a man, all I can think is, those ladies deserve a medal. That boy got a huge boost to his self-confidence.
On a different note though, I know there is a difference when the teacher is male or female and the student is a boy or a girl, but it reminds me of a personal experience.
I was in my mid 20’s in the early ‘90s and I got a job working as an English teacher in Tokyo.
I worked at a number of different schools and I quite enjoyed it. The schools and classes varied as did the teaching method in each school. For example, in some schools, I’d work as the only teacher. At others I would be paired with a Japanese English teacher. I also taught at both co-ed and gender segregated schools.
At one particular school where they segregated boys and girls, I taught as the sole teacher for both boys and girls classes at different age levels. The pre-puberty younger kids were so attentive and showed genuine interest in the class. They were easy to teach. The older post-pubescent teens on the other hand were a handful. It didn’t help that the school didn’t emphasize the credit value of an English conversation class taught by a foreigner. It just made the class a joke for many of those teens.
To come to the point, I was disturbed at how incredibly promiscuous and flirtatious the girls were. I did ask some of my Japanese colleagues if they were experiencing the same thing, but it seems they never did, (or at least they didn’t admit to it). Perhaps I wasn’t as intimidating or as strict as my Japanese colleagues. That kind of behaviour didn’t occur so blatantly in the co-ed classes, and never in classes where I was paired with a Japanese English teacher.
But that’s not all. I had one incident where somehow, some of the students had found out my home address. I have no idea how they found out, I certainly never told them. I was at home on a weekend when I hear a knocking on the door and two of my 16 year old girl students were standing there. I was a bit shocked. At first I thought that they perhaps just needed some help with the homework I had assigned, so I invited them in and made some tea. It was soon clear to me that they had different intentions. I am not going to go into details, but needless to say, I told them it was inappropriate and then I showed them to the door.
The point is, although I personally feel it’s inappropriate for teachers to have sexual relations with students, I can speak from personal experience when I say that not all girls are victims, some girls can be in such relationships consensually, just as much as boys would. It could have happened to me if I hadn’t had control of my convictions.
Good points. There’s a common understanding floating around that sex crime = serious harm to victim, and that’s one of the biggest justifications for the Sex Offender Registry and whatnot. Because people who do those things are inherently dangerous and hurt people very badly.
It’s not likely that the laws are going to change anytime soon to make this legal, but it would be interesting to know if there has been any actual hardcode psychological research into the harm sustained by various acts under various situations. I’m not sure there really is even a way to quantify a measurement of sexual harm.
Doctor: “Let me pull out the charts from those tests I ordered. I see the perp touched you inappropriately once at age 11, twice at age 12, and had sex with you three times at age 13. That did a total of 3.4 molestons of damage to your psyche. Let me recommend the Valley Sexual Trauma Healing Center - in a study run by Penn State in 2013 it was demonstrated that the VSTHC delivers between 1.2 and 1.4 antimolestons for every six months of full-time residential therapy at a confidence level of 90%.”