Why aren’t governments addressing the epidemic of sexual abuse in America’s public schools?

This week the Washington Post published a lengthy article about a South Carolina school police officer accused of multiple sexual assaults on high school girls. It turns out that more than 200 police officers have been charged with child sexual abuse between 2005 and 2022.

These officers patrol schools to prevent mass shootings. But a few bad apples among them are sexual predators. “The Department of Justice and many law enforcement agencies and school systems have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out violent officers,” the After claims.

The tragedy is that these allegations come as no surprise. They are just the latest in a steady stream of media stories about sexual abuse in American public schools. The problem is undoubtedly similar in other countries. The difference is that gathering meaningful information about abuse in schools is much more difficult in the United States because of the sheer size and number of jurisdictions – 50 states plus the District of Columbia and other territories, spread across more than 13,000 school districts.

Three articles by journalist James Varney for RealClearInvestigations highlight a huge problem that surfaces from time to time but has never been extensively investigated. He writes: “For reasons ranging from shame to an eagerness to avoid accountability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobby groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.”

Lack of data is a consistent problem that seems almost insurmountable. Last year, a Business Insider journalist dug into the issue after discovering that the public high school he attended in Southern California had become “a hunting ground for child molesters.” He concluded that “sloppy investigations, quiet firings and a culture of secrecy have protected the abusers, not the students.”

How many victims?

How many children have been abused in American schools? It’s impossible to put a number on it. A newspaper count would leave out the teachers and school staff who were quietly fired or never reported.

However, Varney writes that “Given the approximately 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees likely runs into the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.”

Millions? This surely outweighs the abuse problem in the Catholic Church, which has been pilloried for protecting abusive clergy from the law.

The most important study on the prevalence of sexual abuse in public schools is 20 years old and controversial, but it also raises questions that remain unanswered.

In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft of Hofstra University was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to analyze the extent of sexual abuse in public schools. She based her work on survey data collected for the American Association of University Women. Her methodology has not been above criticism, but what she found is still used as a benchmark. And it is deeply troubling.

Shakeshaft found that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 through 11 reported unwanted sexual misconduct by school employees. “Misconduct” included a wide range of behavior, from pranks to touching to leering to rape. If that percentage is accurate, she calculated that “more than 4.5 million students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee somewhere between kindergarten and 12th grade.”

Around the same time, the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference released the results of an independent study on clergy abuse. The John Jay Report found that between 1950 and 2002, 10,667 people alleged that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors.

“So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft said in a 2004 interview with Education Week. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is probably more than 100 times greater than the abuse by priests.” She probably meant the number of victims, not the number of crimes.

The cover-up affair

Numerous reports have claimed that the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse is worse than the crime itself. The UK Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, published in 2022, is one of many. It concluded that:

“The protection of personal and institutional reputations over the protection of children was a common institutional response. Legal authorities were not informed, perpetrators were ‘relocated’ and there were failures by those with authority to investigate allegations thoroughly. Records of allegations of child sexual abuse were not kept.”

When a grand jury released a report on sexual abuse in Pennsylvania in 2018, it said the Catholic Church had “developed a playbook to hide the truth.” That report was seriously flawed, as Mercator noted at the time, but the metaphor is a useful one. American public schools use that playbook. Among educators, it’s called “passing the trash”: Abusers are quietly fired and allowed to move to another school district, where they commit abuse again.

Billie-Jo Grant, of California Poly State University, an expert on school abuse, told Varney that the federal Department of Education (DOE) “does not and has never track adult sexual misconduct against students. DOE has never worked aggressively to prevent teachers unions and administrators from passing the buck. DOE is failing to hold accountable the many accomplices who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools across the country.”

“Passing the trash” is “a shockingly common phenomenon in American public schools,” according to a 2023 study by the Defense of Freedom Institute. It also cites research by Billie-Jo Grant that found abusive teachers are passed around three different school districts before being fired or charged by police, and that they may have as many as 73 victims.

There are laws on the books to ban the practice, but they are ineffective. Activists are lobbying for model legislation called the SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation) Act. Progress has been slow; only a handful of states have passed it.

The common thread

Outrage over abusive clergy and cover-ups by bishops in the Catholic Church is understandable. The Church sets high moral standards for its faithful, and they deserve exemplary pastors. The vast majority of priests are, and always have been, upright and decent men, and in recent years the number of abuse cases has declined dramatically. But the scandal of predatory priests, negligent bishops, and the ruined lives of children cries out to heaven for vengeance. The Church’s tarnished reputation can be part of its atonement for these transgressions.

It is incomprehensible, however, that public school systems in the United States and other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, have learned nothing from that disaster and are not being investigated with the same vigor. This failure suggests that most governments, federal and state, are more interested in weakening Christian churches than in protecting students. This puts children in danger. As one activist told Varney, “We are not obligated to send our children to church; we are obligated to send them to school.”

It’s not just a question of honesty. In recent decades, an epidemic of child sexual abuse has spread through institutions in Western countries, from churches to Boy Scouts to public schools. The Catholic Church is certainly no exception. There may be a deep cultural problem in our society that we’re afraid to face: We no longer understand the purpose of our powerful sexual urges. As a result, they lash out like live wires, burning innocent children.

Until governments address this and stop using churches as a scapegoat, the problem will continue and millions of children will be hurt.

Do you have experience with sexual abuse in government schools?

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