In three-must-be-a-trend news, Sadie of Jezebel says there’s already a bit of an avalanche of women teachers having sexual relationships with male students. Which makes it not only inappropriate from a power-gradient point of view but also makes it statutory rape. Oops. Not ok.
While doing the legwork on the appropriate “to be sures” about appropriateness, and while acknowledging the psychological complications male students develop… roughly as frequently as female students do… Sadie hits a couple of rough patches.
An oversimplification, sure, but worth thinking about; as a rule, these women seem less like general sexual predators with uncontrollable appetites than those who’ve developed “feelings” for specific boys. Better? No, but arguably less dangerous.
First of all, hello! Correct me if I’m wrong (I could be) but flipping Humbert Humbert had a specific thing for the archetypical Lolita. And while there are certainly exceptions, as far as I know rather than just leaping into the girl’s shower room with their socks on most predatory (heterosexual) male teachers seem to develop “feelings” for specific girls as well. Which, like women teachers with “feelings” for specific boys, really is less dangerous…
... for all the other, non-specific girls or boys.
Less dangerous for the specific students though? Evidently not so much.
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I don’t want to say I’m exactly encouraged by this development, or the college-level case I mentioned in “Great In a Bar, Not At All Great in Academia“ but I do think the increasing frequency, and the increasingly level-headed tone of discussion, may have two long-term consequences. First, it breaks up the notion that sexual, um, opportunism is more a matter of, well, opportunity rather than inherent in gender. And so more attention may be paid to mitigating such behavior generally. Second, it also breaks up notion that women aren’t sexually assertive. A behavior that’s pretty disgraceful in teacher/student relationships (regardless of age), but is actually pretty socially beneficial when conducted between adults.
Finally, half-horribly but half-hopefully, it’s good to hear these women discussed as simply “unable to resist temptation” instead of the usual, way more gendered fare that women are just perverting their natural affinity for children. In most cases abusive female teachers, any more than male ones, don’t seem to be mentally ill mini-Mary Letourneau’s.
Submitted by 2635 (not verified) on Thu, 2009-01-15 10:09.
Not that I've done any formal research on this ... but I've discussed the topic of sexual harassment in the schools with hundreds of college students over the past few years, and I've repeatedly been stunned at the ubiquity sexual harassment and sexual imposition committed by female teachers.
The main difference I see is that male teachers still seem to have a lock on the "hostile environment" flavor of harassment: flirting with all the conventionally pretty girls, asking them to step up on a table to admire their short skirts, even giving those girls better grades than they've earned. Both men and women, by contrast, get embroiled in "relationships" with students - which nearly always constitute statutory rape. My sense is that male teachers are still in the majority even in that category, but nowhere near as overwhelmingly.
High schools and colleges really do differ on this count. Sexual harassment by female professors as a fraction of total cases is much lower the fraction accounted for by female high school teachers. (Or it's exceptionally well hidden.) One possible explanation for this is that schools have a tendency to become insular worlds in a way that universities just don't, because universities are generally larger and college students spend much less time in the classroom.