Predatory Teachers

An estimated five million students in United States schools have been assaulted sexually by teachers, according to a congressional report. But no one is calling for investigations or law enforcement crackdowns, there have been no campaigns to ban the offenders from schools, and in many states there aren't even any requirements such predator attacks be reported to education licensing agencies. "We have approximately five million children suffering and no one is calling for an investigation, for any kind of data to be collected to find out why that many children are being hurt by teachers," said Terri Miller, who runs probably the only organization in the nation that focuses specifically on assaults by educators on students. "This is an epidemic."

In fact, in many cases, especially where the attacker is a woman and the student a male, such assaults are treated as a joke, with a hand-slap for the teacher, and some ribald locker room humor directed at the student. Miller said that the problem easily could be many times larger than the scandals involving Catholic Church priests molesting children, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in civil liabilities already determined in those cases. "You are not mandated to send your children to church, but you are mandated by law to send your children to school," she said. "And, by God, schools better be mandated to keep them safe." She's said she's confident of two things: the problem is bigger than most people want to realize, and there's very little being done to address it.

• JJ Commentary: Our lust-filled media has produced a society where there are no absolute standards. Consequently, people do “whatever is right in his own eyes” (Deut. 12:8, Judges 17:6, 21:25, et. al.). This is a clear end-time phenomenon, “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2Tim. 2-4).