Study Cites Adult Sexual Offenses in Schools

Nearly 10% of U.S. elementary and secondary students will experience some kind of sexual misconduct by school employees -- from inappropriate jokes to actual molestation, according to a report compiling more than 10 years of research on sexual abuse in classrooms.

The study, required by the No Child Left Behind Act and delivered to Congress on Wednesday, pulls together research, surveys, media reports and criminal statistics to examine the frequency of sexual harassment and abuse involving students and adults.

“This report arms parents with information,” said Brian Jones, general counsel at the Department of Education.

Teachers or teacher’s aides are responsible for about 40% of incidents, the report found. African American and Latino students are more likely than white students to be targets of misconduct. About 56% of students who reported misconduct were female, and 57% of the offenders were male.

The report describes an environment in which students are reluctant to report abuse, particularly when it involves an authority figure: The adults “lie to them, isolate them, make them feel complicit, and manipulate them into sexual contact. Often teachers target vulnerable or marginal students who are grateful for the attention.”

The report covers students ages 5 to 18 and all school employees, including teachers, coaches, bus drivers, counselors and administrators. Although the study was commissioned to look at only sexual abuse, researcher Charol Shakeshaft, an education professor at Hofstra University, chose to broaden the scope to include lesser infractions, such as sexual comments, graffiti and groping.

Teachers’ representatives seized on the sweeping scope to defend school employees.

“The thing that concerns educators about this report is that it lumps together harassment with other issues,” said Michael Pons, spokesman for the National Education Assn., the country’s largest teachers union.

“We feel that the issues covered in the report cover a broad spectrum,” said John Mitchell, deputy director for education issues at the American Federation of Teachers, an AFL-CIO affiliate. “We suspect that a small percentage of that number involve criminal behavior.”

But that reasoning misses the point, said Jones, the Education Department official.

“It’s important to be made aware of all of the incidents of misconduct that occur in the classroom, whether it’s criminal sex assault or inappropriate sexual jokes,” he said. “Schools ought to be held accountable. Schools and school districts ought to do a better job of screening and training.”

Both unions support measures to require fingerprinting and background checks for school employees, and they are working to increase awareness and better training for teachers, their representatives said.

In California, all schools are required to have a written policy on sexual harassment.

Shakeshaft’s study was in part based on research conducted by the American Assn. of University Women. Its 1993 report, “Hostile Hallways,” was one of the first to investigate harassment in the nation’s schools.

In a 2001 update, the group found that 83% of girls and 79% of boys reported having been harassed -- but most of those reports involved harassment by other students, not school employees.