Teacher Sex Abuse

Two guest commentators in a recent media article on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s response to the problem of predatory sexual behavior committed by teachers initially note what they say was the response to child molestation first structured by the Catholic Church and the Los Angeles Archdiocese. That response was grossly ineffectual and unethical,…

We last left off with one-time U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert in a previous post, noting therein that the former politician — the longest-tenured Republican House speaker in the nation’s history — was soon scheduled to be sentenced in a high-profile criminal case involving allegations of sexual abuse committed against juveniles. There was…

Is the sexual abuse of children by teachers in what a recent New York Times articles calls “the insular, privileged world of American prep schools” a singular or outsized problem as compared with what occurs in public schools? That’s debatable. And it certainly is being debated across the country these days in light of recurring…

Readers seeing the words “grooming behaviors” might typically have no particular reaction to them at all, simply viewing them in the commonplace vein of actions taken to render oneself presentable in public. We clean, we comb … we groom. Given that this is a blog focused on advocacy for sexual abuse victims in California, though,…

Former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert is scheduled to be sentenced later this month for criminal wrongdoing regarding evasive money transactions. Those dealings were what initially led to a federal investigation focused upon allegations of Hastert’s sexual abuse of students who were under his charge decades ago, when he was a high school…

“These issues thrive on silence,” says a program director of an organization devoted to reducing violence against young people. The “issues” that individual is referring to are centered on the scourge of sexual assault acts perpetrated by adults — both male and female offenders — against young juvenile males. The resounding silence that often surrounds…

Today’s post continues discussion of a problematic reality we referenced in our immediately preceding entry, namely this: teachers in states across the country who commit acts of sexual misconduct against children and simply relocate to jobs in other areas without repercussions. And then reoffend. How is that possible? It owes to what a recent media…

So, California gets a “B.” That is the letter grade that a team of researchers at USA TODAY have given the state for the way it tracks teachers who might reasonably be termed “problems” for any number of reasons. We referenced the report — a survey, actually — in our immediately preceding blog post, noting…

For obvious reasons, reasonable and loving parents in Southern California and across the country look at their sons’ and daughters’ schools as sanctuaries. That is, they regard those venues as special places where their children go to learn and socialize without fear of being rendered vulnerable to some of life’s harms that simply shouldn’t be…