In Pursuit of the Truth: School Employee Sexual Misconduct

• In Event: In Pursuit of the Truth: School Employee Sexual Misconduct

Abstract

This paper addresses two issues related to the AERA Call that hinder the pursuit of truth in understanding the scope and patterns of school employee sexual misconduct: methods available to collect data and (2) the role of organizational culture in enabling sexual abuse of students.
Trying to understand organizational actions related to the sexual abuse of a student requires something like a postmortem examination when a student is sexually abused by an adult in a school. Such a process would (or could) identify the trigger points where policies, training, supervision, and reporting either failed or increased prevention. These are volatile issues for school administrators and communities. Admitting that a school is vulnerable to adult abuse of children – particularly that abuse has occurred – is received as an admission of failure and incompetence. The counsel to leaders has been to focus on the myth that every person who becomes a teacher is a professional motivated only by concerns to advance children. The child-related counterpart is to blame the victim – “She flirted with him,” and “They are teenage boys, she just made them happy.” Blaming the victim is far less risky for a school administrator than blaming school employee. The organizational corollary is “We couldn’t have known.”
Most of the time, the administrative stakeholders just want to put the ugly incident behind them, a response which does little to prevent future abuse. An additional barrier to action-oriented postmortems is getting access for data collection to a critical mass of school districts. However valuable direct inquiry might be, it turns out to be next to impossible to get permission from a school district to interview students, teachers, administrators, victims, parents of victims, and predators. Very few, if any, sites would allow such scrutiny. And thus, we have little research on the organizational components that enable the sexual abuse of students by school employees.
However, this paper is based upon a set of data that does exactly that. Having served as an expert witness in nearly 200 cases of school employee sexual abuse over a twenty year period, I have had access to school policies, police reports, depositions of school administrators, parents, targets/victims, teachers, and abusers. For each case, I analyzed policies in place and how they were followed; hiring; training; response to red flags; and supervision. I was able to hear, in the voices of both the offender and the victim/target, what happened. I have permission from plaintiff attorneys and IRB approval for this completed study.
Using these sources of data, I have a clear and data supported understanding of how organizations enable and support – whether consciously or not – sexual misconduct of employees directed at students. I have documented how organizational cultures stop bystanders from reporting, how organizational beliefs about staff members and students keep administrators from hearing complaints and cries for help, and how these behaviors often enable and create offenders from employees who did not start out to sexually exploit a student.

Author

• Charol Shakeshaft, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Presenting Author