Ah, do we need Johnny LA in here or would you please explain helicopter parenting?
Hovering
Well, there’s a recent case (two weeks ago, conviction, actually) where the local city schools returned a known pedophile teacher to the classroom, after having made an agreement with the mother of a child he had molested to keep him out of the classrooms. They were stupid enough to do it before the statute of limitations ran out, though - so the guy was prosecuted, and convicted. Here’s the thread I started that went into more details - the links are probably dead, though. The local paper doesn’t believe in keeping free archives up for more than a week.
The AP did a story within the past couple of weeks about how common hiding pedophile offences in the public schools actually is. It’s pretty disheartening.
So, I’m another voting for the “It’s an artifact of increased reporting, not a reflection of increased occurance.”
ETA: Here’s CNN’s online version of the AP story.
Are you thinking of Oleanna? It was originally a play. We watched it in our teacher training course; very interesting movie.
A term I’ve heard recently, it describes the parents who are unable or unwilling to let their kids stand on their own 2 feet. An example:
I was discussing with my local school administrator the idea, and he said that several times, when a student is failing a class, their parents will call and complain, or try to arrange for extra credit.
This is for a local community college, which is almost completely attended by high school graduates.
I have also heard of parents calling to complain about “unfair reviews” at work.
Helicopters hover, much like these parents hover over their kids, not wanting them to face the “hard crule world” on their own.
/hijack
Why the explosion in teacher/student sex?
Sampling bias. What Glazer said in post #20.
Another vote for underreported in the past. My first wife was from the Scranton Pa. area. She casually mentioned one day that the local Catholic priest was well known for molesting boys. He’d been doing it for years and it was common knowledge. Me being 21 and from West Ky. I was appalled and couldn’t figure out why an irate dad hadn’t taken a 12 gauge to the guy.
Stories about good looking female high school students having inexplicably good grades in certain classes have been around forever.
Testy
Or could you be thinking of “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer” – Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple? Cary Grant isn’t a teacher, but he meets Shirley Temple while giving a presentation at her high school. It’s one of those 1940s screwball comedies that plays so weirdly today. Shirley Temple has a crush on Cary Grant, sneaks into his house, and then he is “caught” and goes to court – where the judge or a psychiatrist or someone instructs him to pretend to date her, I guess the point being that would make her see the error of her ways. Or something.
Yes! (Well, I mean, I can’t speak for that poster, but) I saw that movie once, three years ago, when it happened to come on TV, and I’ve been looking for it ever since. Thank you!
My suggestion is Term of Trial (1962) with Laurence Olivier and Sarah Miles as teacher and pupil respectively.
OK, I’m appalled that a teacher would abuse their authority and you for two years, but why did it go on for two years? At the risk of sounding naive/ignorant, didn’t you scream to anyone that would listen that this teacher was an abusive perv? Did you not feel you could tell anyone? Why in hell would you feel that? Anyone with a pulse, and I don’t care what year it was, knows that this was wrong and illegal.
I’m not harping on you particularly, Cartooniverse, but I honestly can’t see why someone would have sex with someone for two fucking years against their will. How exactly does this shit happen? Does the notion that this is not only wrong, but illegal, and that the abuser would go down if outed not ever cross the mind of the abused? Is it Stockholm Syndrome or something? I honestly don’t know, as I’ve never been abused in any way. (yeah, I know that abusers use their position of authority to abuse, but I honestly think that if George fucking Bush was trying to abuse me, I’d tell every single adult I knew in an effort to get it stopped, even if I was 4 years old).
By the way, I really am sorry for what happened and how it must make you feel. All of my “why didn’t you…” is probably borne out of my frustration at the fact that we can read the year stamped on a dime in somebody’s pocket from space, but we can’t stop perverts from abusing children. Bah… :mad:
Google is your friend (if you have firefox, highlight the word or phrase you don’t understand, right click and select “Search google for “word you don’t understand””
There’s a reason it’s one of the few (perhaps only) Cary Grant film that’s not out on DVD, yanno. 
More seriously:
An Arky, I’m not the person you asked the question of, but I have some knowledge of mental health, and abuse, issues. Let me try to tackle this for a bit, in a very general way.
There are several factors that come into this, depending on the child, the teacher and the family dynamic going on. They work out to roughly three basic mindsets. I’m seperating them for ease of comparison and discussion, but for the most part you’ll find differing degrees of all these in victims of childhood sexual abuse.
[ul]
[li]Shame, and self-blame. The child generally knows that what’s going on is wrong, and unusual. But, because of the general ego-centricism of children in particular, they figure if there is someone who is at fault it must be themselves, after all - if this were a problem with the authority figure, wouldn’t it already have been reported? [/li][li]Uncertainty about how accusations will be heard. Often, as the AP article I linked above showed, with good cause. At first any child’s accusation of sexual abuse is going to be a matter of two conflicting accounts. Depending upon how the seperate authority responds to the accusation the child could find him or herself suddenly subjected to an inquisition to try to get to the truth - and that’s from the authorities that are trying to treat the accusation seriously, and with the import it deserves. [/li][li]Finally, abusers often are good observers of human nature. They will use their authority and the abuse itself, to brainwash the child. It can become easy to convince the child that if there’s any physical pleasure the child must be enjoying the whole situation. Add to that, the still current belief in a lot of quarters that it’s impossible for someone being sexually abused to be aroused against thier will, you’ve got a number of kids who actually end up more screwed up after the try to tell their families, because the family members are working on incorrect assumptions about how arousal, and long-term abuse can work.[/li][/ul]
There are going to be other individual factors involved, too. But those are the three biggies that I am aware of.
And remember, we’re talking about a child. If you know anything about the pathology of abusive relationships, you’ll know that adults often fall for the same three patterns of fallacies, and end up doing nothing to end the abuse, nor report it. If it’s hard for an adult to do that, it’s not exactly reasonable IMNSHO to expect a child, even a teenager, to be able to stand up to those fallacies on their own.
I hope that gives you a little insight to the pathology, An Arky.
I’ll definitely agree with you on high school students dating people who are older than them is a LOT more taboo than it used to be. Instead of “Dad” getting angry and threatening to punch the guy in the mouth, you get parents who have the 18 year old guy arrested for “statutory rape” of his 17 year old girlfriend on the day he turns 18. Dating guys who are older than high school is becoming more taboo and is seen by a lot of kids my age as the “older guy” having some maturity issues that prevent him from dating people in his own age group.
No explosion. This stuff has always happened. It’s just the mass media attention that makes it seem more prevalent.
I can recall several incidents from within just my own school system way back in the 70s-80s. The media didn’t get involved, but tongues sure wagged. (And teachers were just quietly dismissed.)
spoke-'s edit answered what I meant to ask.
Thanks, I appreciate the info!
I did realize that there was shame and fear of retribution, but I still can’t get my mind around not telling anyone. I know how I was as a kid, and I wouldn’t have hesitated one second to tell my parent/cops/whoever that someone was inappropriate with me. Maybe that’s because a.) I was never abused and b.)I had no particular respect or fear of authority from a very young age. (I literally once told my Kindergarten teacher to go fuck herself when she tried to put me in the corner for talking in class; got sent home for that)
::sigh:: I guess all I can do is tell my kids this (repeatedly):
Nobody is supposed to touch you or talk to you inappropriately under any circumstances and you have to tell somebody if it happens. We’ll make sure it won’t happen again, no matter what. We will make sure you won’t be ignored or get in any trouble for telling, no matter what. We love you no matter what, and it’s not your fault in any way if this happens. Period. Amen. End of Story.
Oleanna was written as a play in the late '80s, and involved a college student, and the entire plot revolved around whether anything happened at all, so…no.
But if someone actually doesn’t have respect for authority, they’re not going to risk making things worse by telling anything that could be embarassing, let alone damaging, to someone they don’t trust.I was never sexually abused, but in elementary school several of the teachers encouraged the other students to humiliate and socially abuse me. I wouldn’t have told them if someone shot me with a gun - because I knew they wouldn’t do a single thing to help me. And would possibly make the whole situation worse. I certainly learned to respect how teachers could make life Hell, or encourage other students to make life Hell for a single student.
Granted, my parents knew about the situation, but there was little they could do, within the confines of that school system, since the teachers involved were all tenured, long-term teachers.