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This excellent piece from The Daily Wire exposes something that many in our government and nation don’t seem to want to talk about: the massive sex-abuse scandal involving schools and our children.
From The Daily Wire. It’s always interesting to notice what kind of data the government tracks, and what kind of data gets completely ignored.
Pray for your fellow intercessor.
Every couple of years, for example, we get something called a “National Climate Assessment.” If the sea level rises by a millimeter off the Oregon coast, you’ll know about it. We also receive regular government reports on the number of women who decide to take STEM classes and the popularity of nonbinary and pansexual gender identities in places like Honduras.
What we haven’t received, for two decades, is a comprehensive update from the government on the number of children who are sexually abused in public schools. It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee. That’s one in ten students, totaling more than 5 million child victims in the system at any given time. Teachers, coaches, and bus drivers were the most common offenders.
A finding like that should have led to a national outcry and immediate changes. And indeed, the Department of Education’s report recommended several new policies for screening employees and standardizing policies to make these kinds of incidents easier to report and keep track of. But that never happened. …
There certainly was no broader cultural reaction to the Department of Education’s report, either. And that’s a big contrast to other scandals involving systemic sexual abuse. …
I’ve wondered when the public will start to care even a little bit about the rampant sex abuse scandal in the public school system — you know, the place where 50 million American children spend the majority of their formative years. So far, the answer has been “not yet” — even though every other day, we’re hearing about another child who’s been sexually abused by a teacher.
Here’s just the latest example, from earlier this week:
There are so many stories like this, just this year, and even the past month, that it’s impossible to cover all of them in this show. Even if I spent the whole hour on it, I couldn’t do it. But I will go through some of them because it’s important to understand the scale of the problem. …
Three weeks ago in Omaha, for example, police said they caught a 45-year-old married substitute teacher in her car having sex with a 17-year-old student. Here’s that story: …
You’ll hear from some corners of the internet that this kind of sexual abuse is no big deal because 17 is considered legally old enough to consent to sexual activity in some states, including Nebraska. They’ll say it’s a “victimless” crime, even though none of the people saying that would want their son or daughter to be found having sex with a middle-aged teacher in the backseat of a Honda Pilot on a dead-end road at 3:00 a.m. Further, we should note, many of the victims in systemic sexual abuse scandals that have attracted widespread attention have been even older than 17. …
Another excuse I’ve heard to explain why the sex abuse epidemic in schools isn’t treated as a major scandal is that, supposedly, the perpetrators are being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. There is no cover up. But that’s not true. That’s a lie. You don’t get thousands of abusers in your system without cover-ups. If there was a habit of smoking these people out and holding them accountable, you wouldn’t end up with 5 million abused kids in the system, obviously. …
As FOX-9 in Minneapolis found just this week, in response to allegations of sexual misconduct concerning teachers, schools can choose not to renew teachers’ contracts instead of firing them outright. That avoids all of their legal reporting obligations. …
This is how most jurisdictions handle child sex abuse in schools. … They shuffle the abuser to another school without telling anyone. …
One of the few jurisdictions that actually takes this kind of abuse seriously is Florida. Here’s a report from Hillsborough County, from just two weeks ago.
“He’s facing mandatory life imprisonment.” That should be the norm in every single one of these schools, K-through-12, where a teacher sexually abuses a child. But it’s not. That’s why you keep hearing so many of these stories. …
… [W]ithin the past year, a nonprofit called the Defense of Freedom Institute conducted its own investigation into the data from public schools. They analyzed various reporting numbers that the government makes available, but only if you know where to look. Here’s what they found:
Between 2010 and 2019, the number of complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) alleging sexual violence against K–12 schools more than tripled. …
The solution, as outlined by the Defense of Freedom Institute, is as straightforward as it was in 2004. Congress should require local education agencies (and school districts) to catalogue and report all school-level data on sexual abuse and violent crimes. Any school district or local education agency that conceals these crimes — or allegations concerning these crimes — should lose federal funding immediately, for starters.
But Congress has shown no interest in passing a law like that, because there has been no national campaign about child sex abuse in schools. Certainly, there’s been nothing on the level of the Me Too movement, or the coverage of the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal. …
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(Excerpt from The Daily Wire. Photo Credit: Moore Media/Getty Images via Canva Pro)