Hot for Teacher

I Googled “New Jersey Coach Charged with Assault” with the thought that one or two articles about recent news items might come up. Wow, was I wrong!! Jersey City, Princeton, Morristown, Burlington County, North Brunswick, Woodbridge all have had teachers and coaches charged with some form of sexual assault on students in just the past year. I have to wonder what is going on and is this something new we have to concern ourselves with?

When news started coming out about Catholic priests and the rampant sexual abuse of altar boys, our trust in the people we had entrusted our children to became seriously eroded. Citizens demanded the heads of those priests accused of such gross improprieties while the Church tried to downplay the severity and, indeed, denied many of the charges leveled. Some of the accused “retired”, some faced their accusers in a court of law and were shown no mercy, being sentenced for their crimes anywhere from nine to twenty five years.

Now we are facing a new group of “predators”-teachers. In England, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers stated that teachers should not be prosecuted for having affairs with students. In Washington state, the teachers’ union there presented themselves as a “friend of the court” in a case where a teacher was charged after having sex with an 18 year old student. And this is the fine line that I am about to cross.

Last year a teacher in North Brunswick was caught by police in a “sexual act” with a 17 year old local high school student. The teacher, charged with sexual assault, was 32. He recently was sentenced to three years in jail-for what amounts to having an affair. Had the girl not been a student, even if she was 16, this would not have been an issue. The legal age of consent in New Jersey is 16, which is the average age across the US. Only seven states list 18 as their age of consent. However, most states have some sort of statute within their laws that disallow that age of consent when persons have “supervisory or disciplinary authority” over their “victim”. It would also have to include supervisors or managers in the work sector too, but unless charges are brought in civil court regarding sexual harassment on the job, rarely if ever has a boss been charged and jailed for an in-office affair.

There is no doubt that there are perverted predators; many of the teachers and coaches that have been charged with sexual crimes have been accused by children and have conducted their abuse over a period of years. But what about teachers like the young man from North Brunswick? Is he a sexual predator or just someone who got caught up in the heat of passion with someone who, as more than one student in the school put it, “knew what she was doing”?

For the rest of their lives, those that are convicted, regardless of time served, will have to register under Megan’s Law as sex offenders. There are 3 tiers under which they must register, with tier 3 being the worst as most likely to re-offend. Tier two offenders present a moderate risk of re-offense while tier one present a small to moderate risk of re-offense. The vast majority of registered offenders fall under tier two, which runs the gamut from flashers to child endangerment. It is not out of the realm of possibilities that the young North Brunswick man will be a tier 2.

My personal feeling on this issue is that cases such as those that involve age of consent students should warrant a closer look by authorities. Was the student a willing participant of recent stature? What were mitigating circumstances? Who made the first advance and what steps or measures had the accused taken, if any, to divert the situation?

The abuse of children is a travesty and sexual abuse can mar a child the rest of his or her life. But when laws are in place that give age of consent, but make exceptions to the law that are so ambiguous as to allow charges to be leveled against anyone who is considered in a “position of authority”, those laws need to be looked at very, very closely. There are adults whose lives are at stake as well and I think that we as a nation of paranoid parents, forget that.