What's behind today's epidemic of teacher-student sex?

    In today's sexually permissive school environment, just how prevalent is the teacher-student sex problem?

    Get ready for a shock. According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education – the most in-depth investigation to date – nearly 10 percent of U.S. public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees.

    Titled "Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature," the report says the mistreatment of students ranges from sexual comments to rape. In fact, says the study's author Charol Shakeshaft, professor of educational administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., the scope of the school-sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy-abuse scandal that has recently rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

    Comparing the incidence of sexual misconduct in schools with the Catholic Church scandal, Shakeshaft notes that a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests between 1950 and 2002.

    In contrast, she extrapolates from a national survey conducted for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000 that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000.

    The figures suggest "the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests," said Shakeshaft, according to Education Week.

    Indeed, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade, says the report.

    Recently, there has been a seeming explosion in a special type of teacher sexual abuse – female teachers having sex with underage teenage boys, who as a rule are willing participants in the sex.

    "Generally the male doesn't feel victimized," said Steven B. Blum, a consulting psychologist to a sex offender program in Nebraska. "A lot of teenage boys would see that as their lucky day," he told the Los Angeles Times.

    Lucky day? What about the next day, and the next year and beyond? Experts say sexually victimized boys experience later difficulty in developing age-appropriate relationships and gravitate toward pornography and one-night stands. They are also more likely as adults to suffer depression, anxiety and drug addiction.

    The 16-year-old victim of Margaret De Barraicua, a 30-year-old California teacher who pleaded guilty to four counts of statutory rape, did not consider it his "lucky day."

    "I'm not the same boy," the boy said in a letter read in court in Sacramento. "At school I became the center of attention. Everyone knew my name." But the boy was so traumatized, his mother wrote in a letter read in court, that "his hair is falling out."

    And the father of a Colorado boy molested by Silvia Johnson – who held drug-alcohol-and-sex parties at her home with teenaged schoolboys to be "cool" – told the court the 40-year-old woman "took away my best friend, my hunting buddy. I can't have him back now. He is gone."

    Many theories and factors are advanced to explain the major upsurge in illegal teacher-student sexual relationships, including:

    Two-breadwinner families mean children have more unsupervised time to be preyed upon.

    Cell-phone technology, text messaging and e-mail afford opportunities for teachers and students to communicate privately that didn't exist a generation ago.

    The explosion of hardcore pornography, especially online, has resulted in the exposure of children to graphic sexual images to a far greater degree than at any time in history.
    But overshadowing virtually all explanations for adult-child sex is the simple fact that the perpetrators – and in the case of female offenders having sex with underage boys, the victims as well – often don't think there is anything wrong with what they are doing.

    Essentially, the rationale is: Consensual sex doesn't kill, injure or rob anyone, so where's the victim? Why is "love" (remember Letourneau's book, "Only One Crime, Love") even a crime at all?