Recent reviews of the amount of sexual abuse committed by public school teachers shows that is far, far worse than what occurred with the Catholic Church.
A recent article by James Varney from RealClearInvestigations reveals that millions of students in U.S. K-12 schools are sexually abused every decade. This is far and away worse than what happened with the Catholic Church.
“In any given year they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told RealClearInvestigations. Stunned by a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found 523 incident reports of sexual misconduct by employees of the city’s schools during the past decade, DeVos during the Trump administration launched the process of including specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a process it undertakes every two years. Previously, the Office for Civil Rights asked only general questions about sexual misconduct incidents, without a breakdown of alleged perpetrators.
The Biden administration initially sought to remove those questions, saying it wanted to avoid data duplication, but it backtracked after fierce criticism it was doing so as a sop to teachers unions. Consequently, the question will be included on future questionnaires, but, as of today, the Department of Education “has no data,” a spokesperson told RCI. These days, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, even a cursory review of local news reporting brings disquieting revelations of teachers accused of or arrested for alleged sexual relations with a student.
It is estimated that one in ten children in U.S. public schools end up being sexually abused by a teacher or administrator at their school.
“The rate of educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy,” said Terri Miller, head of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation). Miller also noted that in 2021 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported it had received nearly 4,300 sexual abuse allegations. “Another striking contrast is we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”
Despite all this abuse, the Dept. of Education does not bother to track this problem. They utterly ignore it all as if it isn’t happening.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
