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Sexual predators no laughing matter
Sunday, July 20, 2008
The subject was Carolynn Hatcher, the 25-year-old teacher charged with six counts of sexual battery after she allegedly became pregnant by a 16-year-old Middletown boy in foster care.
"Where was she when I was in high school?" quipped one of my friends.
He sniffed, "I never met my Mrs. Robinson."
I joined in the general laughter, but almost immediately felt uncomfortable. If the genders were reversed, would anybody be laughing?
Would anybody say, "Gee, that 13-year-old girl, she's lucky to be getting some!"
But when disgraced teacher Mary Kay Letourneau married her former sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau — and the father of two of her daughters — in 2005, much of the news coverage was very different. The pair was lauded as star-crossed lovers, happy at last.
Local experts say female sexual predators are still such a relative rarity that people don't know how to react. University of Dayton sociology professor Claire Renzetti said the reaction often goes one of two ways, neither of them healthy: "Either we trivialize it, or we demonize the woman; women just don't do this, so she must be a monster."
Unfortunately, she said, the underlying tragedy is all too common: The victim is abused by someone he should have trusted, someone who should have protected him.
Doubly tragic is the fact this was already a troubled boy, with 24 juvenile convictions and a history as a chronic runaway. According to authorities, the boy's parents signed him over to Butler County Children Services after officials learned he had been abused by his father. In September the boy was placed in Mid-Western Children's Home in Pleasant Plain, in September after being released from detention by the Department of Youth Services. (In another troubling development, this is the third time in eight years that an employee has faced allegations of having sex with a child at the Christian group home.)
Gregory Ramey, a child psychologist at Children's Medical Center, said national statistics show that 90 percent of sexual predators are male. Sexual assault is an underreported crime to begin with; it may be even more so for boys, Ramey said, because of embarrassment and cultural assumptions that teenage boys can't be "victims" of a predatory older woman. Yet the emotional toll is equally devastating for boys.
This case is particularly complicated. "This is a boy without a father who has now fathered a child," Ramey said.
With counseling, however, every victim — no matter how horrific the abuse — can go on to lead healthy, productive lives. No child should be written off as damaged goods.
One of the keys is having someone you can trust, someone you can talk to. "These crimes thrive in secrecy," Ramey said. "That's why it's so important for parents to communicate with their children."
And we need to be careful what we say when we think they aren't listening.
We need to avoid the "hubba hubba" talk when it comes to the relationships between adult women and teenage boys.
This isn't merely a Mrs. Robinson-style "rite of initiation."
It's a crime.
