Investigation: Teacher Sex Abuse Pervasive
By MARTHA IRVINE; ROBERT TANNER
The young teacher hung his head, avoiding eye contact. Yes, he had touched a fifth-grader’s breast during recess. “I guess it was just lust of the flesh,” he told his boss.
That got Gary C. Lindsey fired from his first teaching job in Oelwein, Iowa, but it didn’t end his career. He taught for decades in Illinois and Iowa, fending off at least a half-dozen more abuse accusations.
When he finally surrendered his teaching license in 2004 – 40 years after that first little girl came forward – it wasn’t a principal or a state agency that ended his career. It was one persistent victim and her parents.
Lindsey’s case is a small example of a bigger problem in American schools: sexual misconduct by the very teachers who are supposed to nurture the nation’s children.
An Associated Press investigation found nearly 2,600 cases over five years in which abusive educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic. Students in America’s schools are groped and raped. They are pursued and seduced.
There are 3 million public school teachers nationwide, most devoted to their work. Yet the number of problem educators speaks to a larger problem in a system that often is stacked against victims.
Most abuse never gets reported, and cases that are reported often end with no action. Many abusers have several victims. Cases investigated sometimes cannot be proven.
And no one – not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments – has found a surefire way to keep abusive teachers out of classrooms.
Those are the findings of a seven-month AP investigation in which reporters sought disciplinary records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the years 2001 through 2005. The result is an unprecedented national look at the scope of sex offenses by educators.
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Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that has been apparent for years.
“From my own experience – this could get me in trouble – I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one,” says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. “It doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural or suburban.”
One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that is sexual in nature.
Jennah Bramow, one of Lindsey’s accusers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wonders why there isn’t more outrage.
“You’re supposed to be able to send your kids to school knowing that they’re going to be safe,” says Bramow, now 20, who was victimized as an 8-year-old elementary student. While other victims accepted settlement deals and signed confidentiality agreements, she and her family sued her city’s schools for failing to protect her and others from Lindsey – and won.
Lindsey, now 68, refused multiple requests for an interview. “It never occurs to you people that some people don’t want their past opened back up,” he said when an AP reporter approached him at his home outside Cedar Rapids and asked questions.
That past, according to evidence presented in Bramow’s civil case, included accusations from students and parents along with reprimands from principals that were filed away, explained away and ultimately ignored until 1995, when accusations from Bramow and two other girls forced his early retirement. Even then, Lindsey kept his teaching license for nearly a decade until the Bramows took the case public and filed a complaint with the state.
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Like Lindsey, the perpetrators the AP found are everyday educators – teachers, school psychologists, principals and superintendents among them. In nearly nine out of 10 cases, they are male.
The overwhelming majority of cases the AP examined involved teachers in public schools. Private school teachers rarely turn up because many are not required to have a teaching license, and even when they have one, disciplinary actions are typically handled within the school.
Two of the nation’s major teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, denounced sex abuse while emphasizing that educators’ rights also must be taken into account.
“Students must be protected from sexual predators and abuse, and teachers must be protected from false accusations,” said NEA President Reg Weaver, who refused to be interviewed and instead released a two-paragraph statement.
Kathy Buzad of the AFT said that “if there’s one incident of sexual misconduct between a teacher and a student, that’s one too many.”
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The AP investigation found efforts to stop individual offenders, but overall, there is a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse.
It can start in school hallways, where fellow teachers may look away or feel powerless to help. School systems make behind-the- scenes deals to avoid lawsuits and other trouble. And in state capitals and Congress, lawmakers shy away from tough state punishments or any cohesive national policy for fear of disparaging a vital profession.
That can enable rogue teachers and put kids who aren’t likely to be believed in a tough spot.
In case after case the AP examined, accusations of inappropriate behavior were dismissed. One girl in Mansfield, Ohio, complained about a sexual assault by teacher Donald Coots and got expelled. It was only when a second girl, years later, brought a similar complaint against the same teacher that he was punished.
That second girl also was ostracized by the school community and ultimately left town.
Unless there is a videotape of a teacher involved with a child, everyone wants to believe the authority figure, says Wayne Promisel, a retired Virginia detective who has investigated many sex-abuse cases.
He and others who track the problem reiterated one point repeatedly during the AP investigation: Very few abusers get caught.
They point to several academic studies estimating that only about one in 10 victimized children report sexual abuse of any kind to someone who can do something about it.
Teachers, administrators and even parents frequently don’t, or won’t, recognize the signs that a crime is taking place.
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The growing use of e-mail and text messages is leaving a trail that investigators and prosecutors can use to prove an intimate relationship when other evidence is hard to find. But even then, many in the community may find it difficult to accept that a predator is in their midst.
When these cases break, defendants often portray the students as seducers or false accusers. But every investigator questioned said that is largely a misconception.
“I’ve been involved in several hundred investigations,” says Martin Bates, an assistant superintendent in a Salt Lake City school district. “I think I’ve seen that just a couple of times . . . where a teacher is being pursued by a student.”
Often, problem teachers are allowed to leave quietly. That can mean future abuse for another student and another school district.
“They might deal with it internally, suspending the person or having the person move on. So their license is never investigated,” says Charol Shakeshaft, a leading expert in teacher sex abuse who heads the educational leadership department at Virginia Commonwealth University.
It’s a dynamic so common it has its own nicknames – “passing the trash” or the “mobile molester.”
Laws in several states require that even an allegation of sexual misconduct be reported to the state departments that oversee teacher licenses. But there is no consistent enforcement, so such laws are easy to ignore.
School officials fear public embarrassment as much as the perpetrators do, Shakeshaft says. They want to avoid the fallout from going up against a popular teacher. They also do not want to get sued by teachers or victims, and they do not want to face a challenge from a strong union.
In the Iowa case, Lindsey agreed to leave without fighting when his bosses kept the reason for his departure confidential. The decades’ worth of allegations against him would have stayed secret, if not for Bramow.
Across the country, such deals and lack of information-sharing allow abusive teachers to cross state lines, even when one school does put a stop to the abuse.
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Still, there are signs of progress. The AP found that the number of state actions against sexually abusive teachers rose steadily, to a high of 649 in 2005.
More states now require background checks on teachers, fingerprinting and mandatory reporting of abuse, though there are still loopholes and a lack of coordination among districts and states.
U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the past 20 years on civil rights and sex discrimination have opened schools up to potentially huge financial punishments for abuses, which has driven some schools to act.
And the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification keeps a list of educators who have been punished for any reason, but it only shares the names among state agencies.
The uncoordinated system that has developed means some teachers still fall through the cracks. Aaron M. Brevik is a case in point.
Brevik was a teacher at an elementary school in Warren, Mich., until he was accused of using a camera hidden in a gym bag to secretly film boys in locker rooms and showers. He also faced charges that he recorded himself molesting a boy while the child slept.
Found guilty of criminal sexual conduct, Brevik is now serving a five- to 20-year prison sentence and lost his Michigan license in 2005.
What Michigan officials apparently did not know when they hired him was that Brevik’s teaching license in Minnesota had been permanently suspended in 2001 after he allegedly invited two male minors to stay with him in a hotel room. He was principal of an elementary school in southeastern Minnesota at the time.
“I tell you what, they never go away. They just blend a little better,” says Steve Janosko, a prosecutor in Ocean County, N.J., who handled the case of a former high school teacher and football coach, Nicholas J. Arminio.
Arminio surrendered his New Jersey teaching license in 1994 after two female students separately accused him of inappropriate touching. The state of Maryland did not know that when he applied for teaching credentials and took a job at a high school in Baltimore County. He eventually resigned and lost that license, too.
Even so, until this month, he was coaching football at another Baltimore County high school in a job that does not require a teaching license. After the AP started asking questions, he was fired.
By the numbers
Key findings of an AP investigation into teacher sex abuse:
2,570
educators nationwide were punished for sexual misconduct from 2001 through 2005.
2,625
cases were identified.
1,467
cases included victims who were clearly identified as students. The victim was identified as a young person – a category including students, unidentified youths, family members and neighbors – in at least 1,801 cases.
1,390
criminal convictions were obtained in these cases (53 percent).
446
cases involved educators who had multiple victims.
About the series
Sensational cases make headlines, but the scale of sexual misconduct by teachers in America’s schools gets little attention. The Associated Press has spent months digging through public records in every state to document the problem, revealing a disturbing national picture.
The series
Tomorrow: The effect on one family
Tuesday: Inattention in schools and legislatures, plus tips for parents
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO
MEMO: TEACHER SEX ABUSE
Originally published by The Associated Press.
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