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'Tis the Season Festival
Teacher sex abuse often begins online, review says
Boundaries are stretched with e-mails, instant messages to students, a professor says.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
COLUMBUS — They started with phone calls, then moved on to instant messages. They corresponded about astrology. The 28-year-old teacher told the 17-year-old student he was intrigued by her and found her levelheaded.
After a week or so of online chatting, teacher and coach Jason Ream suggested he and the girl meet one evening. They drove to a northeast Ohio park and made out. Soon they were having sex — at a park, at Ream's apartment, at the student's house.
Extras
Ream ended up in prison, convicted of sexual battery, and lost his state teaching license.
Calling it "obviously a big mistake," Ream, now 33, said he's moved on. "The only thing that still makes it tough is I've got this shadow over my head," he said.
One in every five teachers in Ohio disciplined for inappropriate sexual behavior misbehaved with computers or the Internet, according to a review by The Associated Press of state teacher discipline reports from 2001 through 2005.
Reports from Ohio and around the country show teachers sending raunchy or suggestive e-mails or instant messages, soliciting minors for sex over the Internet and visiting pornographic Web sites on school computers.
"ur wearing a thong u NASTY," a North Carolina sixth-grade teacher said to a 12-year-old girl during a 2003 instant message exchange. His license was revoked.
In Indiana, a choir director and music teacher lost his license in 2001 after pleading guilty to sending sexually explicit e-mails and Internet messages to a 16-year-old girl, including questions about her sex life.
In Oregon, a middle school teacher was kicked out of the classroom after he used his district's Internet connection to send sexually explicit e-mail to seven female students.
The AP's findings were part of a seven-month investigation in which AP reporters sought records on teacher discipline in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Across the country, sexual misconduct allegations led states to take action against the licenses of 2,570 educators from 2001 through 2005. In Ohio, the number was 134 educators, and of those, 32 involved online misconduct. The figures include licenses that were revoked, denied and surrendered.
There are about 155,000 licensed educators in Ohio, including teachers and administrators, and about 3 million public school teachers in the United States.
Young people were victims in at least 63 percent of the Ohio cases, and the large majority of those were students. Nine out of 10 of those abusive educators were male.
As e-mails and instant messages are traded, boundaries get stretched, said Keith Durkin, a professor at Ohio Northern University where he studies child molesting and the Internet.
"The teacher just doesn't go over and fondle the 10-year-old — there's a process that goes on," he said. "They develop a relationship, a friendship, a trust."
Criminologists call it grooming — predators using e-mails or instant messages to lower their victims' inhibitions. But researchers debate how big a role the Internet plays in sexual misconduct.
Does it start the abuse or just facilitate it?
"In the case of educator abuse, these are people who already know each other from another context," said David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.
At best, e-mail "does create a little bit more of a secure, private back channel in which to communicate in," he said. "It may facilitate it but it's not a quantum jump. It's a little bit of shading."
Typically, districts become aware of inappropriate relationships when a student or a friend tells an adult. Complicating the issue is that, in the Internet age, students and teachers often send e-mails back and forth about homework or sports schedules.
Ohio teacher misconduct data
Breakdown of sexual misconduct data for Ohio teachers disciplined by the State Board of Education:
Total number of misconduct cases acted upon by the board from 2001 through 2005: 419.
Number of sexual misconduct cases: 134 (32 percent).
Breakdown of educators involved in sexual misconduct by gender:
Male: 123 (92 percent).
Female: 11 (8 percent).
Student victims in sexual misconduct cases: 71 (53 percent).
No student victim or unknown: 63 (47 percent).
Youth victims in sexual misconduct cases (students, non-student minors and unspecified minors): 85 (63 percent).
Adult or no victim or unknown: 49 (37 percent).
Criminal convictions in sexual misconduct cases: 108 (81 percent).
