FWIW, when I was covering religion for the Guardian ca 2010 I looked into this as best I could and the nearest to an objective comparison between the Catholic church and other bodies was the differing rates offered by US insurance companies against law suits for sex abuse. As I remember, the RC church was not an outlier in terms of religious bodies. Lutherans of some sort or another had the most expensive insurance. There were also some very shocking statistics from the (secular) Swedish child care system. I came to the depressing conclusion that defenceless and unwanted children will be abused under any system and not many outsiders will care.
This isn't strictly relevant to the figures for US public school teachers, I know. But I understand why some Catholics felt they were being unfairly singled out. There was an enormous complicity of indifference from the outside world.
What made the RC abuse uniquely dreadful was the degree to which the authorities sided with and protected the abusers against their victims. I don't know of any secular counterpart to the practice in the dioceses of Boston and Pittsburgh of simply moving abusers to another post if any complaints came in.
The authorities do often side with the abusers, yes. But only in the RC church were they in a position to move identified abusers to new positions after the initial exposure. That's a consequence of the authority structure rather than anything else. One parallel might be with some charity organisations, like (secular) Oxfam, which — I believe — redeployed aid workers found to have been sexually abusing clients to other parts of the world. But I haven't looked up the details of that scandal.
These things are extremely hard to count in any meaningful way, and harder to draw grand conclusions from other than “this happens more than it should,” but I have to admit a bit of frustration here. What’s the point of this question?
If more priests molest kids than teachers does that have some kind of outcome on the culture war? I’m getting the sense that’s why people ask this. Like, are we implying that if teachers molest less frequently than priests that the liberal worldview is better since they more often tend to be democrats? Not accusing you, Jesse, but I’m catching a whiff of that from this one.
This is what frustrates me about our society. We immediately see a chance for a tit for tat exchange and instead of saying “hey, we might have some opportunities to create standards around institutions which cater to children let’s make a list of practical things we can do and test them out” we pour our energies into culture war bullshit.
How about places that care for children have minimum surveillance standards? Kept in a lock box outside the institution and accessed if someone makes an accusation so it’s not just hearsay and the institution can’t put up roadblocks? Or what if we said we need two adults in a room with any single child? But nope. It’s kids being used to tally up who is better, liberals or conservatives.
No one really cares about this except for how it reflects on them. I mean, in Afghanistan we fought and killed people to make them accept female representatives and then said “just keep the Bacha bazzi stuff on the low down.” Sorry to be cynical, I’m usually not, but that has been my experience.
I agree with you, but it's really hard to stop guardians from sexually abusing their kids.
I can't tell you how often I've made a referral to protective services for a child with clear signs of sexual abuse, and it goes nowhere. The agency either does nothing, or the family picks up and moves to another district. When that district catches on and reports the family, they move again.
As to the Bill in FL, I support it. The issue is not "don't say gay". It should be "don't talk about personal stuff, whether you are gay, straight, whatever." I don't remember knowing ANYTHING about the personal lives of any HS or MS teachers. Did they have children? Were they married? Did they have pets? Were they Christian? I knew none of this, and that is what we should hold up as a standard. Teachers are there to teach, not tell us how often they engaged in what sexual activity.
I shouldn’t take this bait, but it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a difference between upholding a professional culture of discretion about personal matters, and having the government outright forbid the mention of personal matters. When I was a kid, my teachers almost all kept their personal and professional lives strictly separate and avoided discussing their politics and religion in keeping with public school policy, but no one found it inappropriate for a lady teacher to simply mention the fact that she *had* a husband.
Of course, if any of my gay teachers (and, in retrospect, there were several) had simply mentioned the existence of a partner, their jobs would have been at risk, because just mentioning the existence of a partner - “My boyfriend made minestrone for dinner last night” - counted as talking about sex in a way that a lady teacher talking about her husband did not. I had teachers who came to school pregnant - nobody considered *that* a statement about their sexual activity. Teachers should be held to a high standard of professional discretion, sure, but you can’t pretend there’s not an obvious double standard here.
Did you read my comment? I don't believe that a female teacher mentioning that she shares a home with a person named Laura is spouting off about sexual orientation, because I don't believe a female teacher mentioning she's married to a person named Steve is spouting off about heterosexuality. I do not believe that your average four-year-old is incapable of understanding that a woman lives with another woman in the way they understand their mother and father to live together.
I'm not talking about more abstract discussions of sexual orientation/gender identity in the classroom because the commenter I responded to wasn't talking about that. The commenter I responded to said they supported the bill because they don't think any teacher should mention anything at all, ever, about their personal life in any context, implying that it's correct for the government to forbid and punish any such mention.
My point was that as it stands right now, pre-government intervention, there's a huge double standard in what counts as "discussing your personal life" depending on whether you're gay or straight. To repeat myself: I think teachers should be held to a high standard of professional discretion, but that doesn't extend to pretending that they have no family life at all, as gay teachers were expected to do throughout my entire schooling, and as the commenter I responded to seems to want them to continue to do.
I am in and out all day of five different Kindergartens. The teachers do not discuss their home lives- they don't mention husbands, wives, anything- except their own children, rarely.
Again: How does it then follow that the government should forbid and punish mention of anything personal whatsoever? I keep thinking someone’s going to argue that that’s not what the bill actually outlaws, but now it’s 3 for 3 on people who seem to think that because it is generally a good idea for teachers to keep mention of their home life out of the classroom, a bill that would chill only gay teachers’ willingness to mention their home life even incidentally must not be that bad, actually.
If on 99% of days a teacher doesn’t mention their spouse, but the very first offhand mention of that spouse can lead to professional sanction under state law, *that is a bad thing.*
I am not saying government should be involved or pass a law- not at all!! And I believe that the far left has purposely nicknamed it the "don't say gay" law because that obfuscates the real intent. The law is a poorly written over reaction. But it IS in reaction to something going on that parents don't like.
My sentiments are with Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a great piece a while ago on the "bait and switch" that some people feel has taken place.
He was very involved in the struggle for marital equality. One of the talking points was that gay marriage does not affect "the straights". Live and let live. Almost everyone got behind marriage equality, something that was once considered unthinkable.
And it was fine! Until the trans thing. Which is not a gay thing (except in that in effect transition sometimes involves sterilizing gay teenagers.)The trans ideology DOES affect straight and gay parents alike.
Now we have some schools presenting the whole gender thing to very young kids. They are being told that they change from a boy to a girl of they feel like it. Kids are being aided in transition by school officials that keep it a secret from the parents.
This bill is about Trans, not gay. That was the impetus. The trans ideology IS being pushed on our children and we don't like it.
Of course, the debate is not really about the numbers -- the numbers are just a crutch. The real debate is the duty of care accepted by each group and the betrayal of the trust that society places in them. The numbers can be high or low, that doesn't matter. What matters is the betrayal we feel, by even a handful of cases.
"Everything I’ve ever read about sex abuse suggests men are much, much more likely to be perpetrators than women"
I believe you, but I've been shocked how often women teachers are arrested for having sex with their students. There is one in the paper nearly every day.
At one point I meant to include something on this: I believe this is an example of the availability heuristic -- basically, we sometimes overestimate events that are rare but attention-getting. A female teacher having sex with a male student is ALWAYS going to get attention, in part *because* it is a reversal of the usual abuse scenario. I think that might cause us to believe these incidents are more common than they are (especially since we live in a very big country where even rare events pop up with some frequency).
BUT if there are specific stats on this I'm open to being convinced it's a bigger problem than I think.
It creates a much stronger tabloid draw, too. The male teacher with the female students is predatory, the female teacher with the male students is scandalous. It shouldn't really be that way, but our culture is what it is.
Plus all the cultural complications of defining consent. Society views 1) "attractive 20 year old female teacher has sex with 17 year old male student" very differently from 2) "attractive 20 year old male teacher has sex with 17 year old female student", and very very differently from 3) "attractive 20 year old male teacher has sex with 17 year old male student" (the female-female circumstance is rare enough to lack tropes.) I'd suspect the police would be most likely to be called in situation 3, then situation 2, and least likely in situation 1. Those numbers would offset somewhat the availability heuristic, and further complicate the data analysis.
Not to mention that to many grown adult men hazily remembering their own horny adolescence, it’s a tittilating fantasy to imagine having had sex with a teacher. Particularly if the teacher is conventionally attractive/younger than they are now.
I think those become big stories because of how rare it is, although men are much less likely (my personal experience) to understand an extreme imbalance of power as rape. I was in a survivor’s group once (going to fudge details a bit here even though I’m anonymous) and this guy told one of the worst stories I’ve ever heard in my life about four of his older cousins doing the most heinous shit you can imagine and then ended it with “but that wasn’t rape, just kids messing around, and I wouldn’t be here if my wife wasn’t about to leave me.”
The power imbalance thing it hard for me, sometimes. People have all kinds of different power, and I don't think all power imbalances barr a sexual relationship.
There are obviously gray cases to everything but a four year old obviously has no meaningful overlap with a seventeen year old. If you can withstand a bunch of sperging out about machine intelligence I have a whole philosophy on this in my substack.
Basically, you need enough power parity that all parties are able to see and understand roughly the same futures.
To build off Jesse's point, about 25 people are struck and killed by lightning each year in the US. Due to weather they're not evenly distributed throughout the year, but if they were and if they received national news attention every time it happened, you'd hear about it about once every two weeks despite it being a rare occurrence.
If Jesse's numbers above are correct, there are around 2.6 million female teachers in the US. If 1% of them are abusers, that's around 26,000 teachers. Things can be statistically rare and still common when you get large populations.
Another complicating factor would be the inclusion of nuns into the analysis. Nuns are also members of the church even if they cannot say mass. You could focus your analysis by only comparing the male/male abuse or just adding nuns to the figure. Another interesting comparison point would be checking on the differences between catholic schools v. public schools. In some catholic schools, there is going to be a fair amount of overlap in the category of priest/teacher and nun/teacher.
I can't remember a single story in which a nun emerges as a perpetrator of sexual abuse. As victims (of priests), surprisingly common, especially in Africa and Asia. As perpetrators of physical and emotional abuse, yes, often. But in — oh God — nearly forty years of writing about religion I don't remember a single news story of a nun as a perpetrator of _sexual_ abuse.
The Fifth Column podcast episode with Rufo is one of the best they've ever done. He made some good points, but you can tell he expected a friendly, fawning interview and was caught off guard by tough questions.
I can't say I'm surprised to see Rufo on the express train to Lindsayville these days.
Totally. TFC interview was the first time I had ever heard of Rufo (or maybe the second, whatever) and I totally got the vibe that he was caught flat-footed.
FWIW, when I was covering religion for the Guardian ca 2010 I looked into this as best I could and the nearest to an objective comparison between the Catholic church and other bodies was the differing rates offered by US insurance companies against law suits for sex abuse. As I remember, the RC church was not an outlier in terms of religious bodies. Lutherans of some sort or another had the most expensive insurance. There were also some very shocking statistics from the (secular) Swedish child care system. I came to the depressing conclusion that defenceless and unwanted children will be abused under any system and not many outsiders will care.
This isn't strictly relevant to the figures for US public school teachers, I know. But I understand why some Catholics felt they were being unfairly singled out. There was an enormous complicity of indifference from the outside world.
What made the RC abuse uniquely dreadful was the degree to which the authorities sided with and protected the abusers against their victims. I don't know of any secular counterpart to the practice in the dioceses of Boston and Pittsburgh of simply moving abusers to another post if any complaints came in.
Jerry Sandusky at Penn State is an egregious example of credible abuse allegations being swept under the rug by a secular organization.
That said, I think it's fair to hold a Church to a higher moral standard than, say, the BBC.
The authorities do often side with the abusers, yes. But only in the RC church were they in a position to move identified abusers to new positions after the initial exposure. That's a consequence of the authority structure rather than anything else. One parallel might be with some charity organisations, like (secular) Oxfam, which — I believe — redeployed aid workers found to have been sexually abusing clients to other parts of the world. But I haven't looked up the details of that scandal.
This is why I consider a lot media coverage on the issue to just be bog standard American anti-papism.
These things are extremely hard to count in any meaningful way, and harder to draw grand conclusions from other than “this happens more than it should,” but I have to admit a bit of frustration here. What’s the point of this question?
If more priests molest kids than teachers does that have some kind of outcome on the culture war? I’m getting the sense that’s why people ask this. Like, are we implying that if teachers molest less frequently than priests that the liberal worldview is better since they more often tend to be democrats? Not accusing you, Jesse, but I’m catching a whiff of that from this one.
This is what frustrates me about our society. We immediately see a chance for a tit for tat exchange and instead of saying “hey, we might have some opportunities to create standards around institutions which cater to children let’s make a list of practical things we can do and test them out” we pour our energies into culture war bullshit.
How about places that care for children have minimum surveillance standards? Kept in a lock box outside the institution and accessed if someone makes an accusation so it’s not just hearsay and the institution can’t put up roadblocks? Or what if we said we need two adults in a room with any single child? But nope. It’s kids being used to tally up who is better, liberals or conservatives.
No one really cares about this except for how it reflects on them. I mean, in Afghanistan we fought and killed people to make them accept female representatives and then said “just keep the Bacha bazzi stuff on the low down.” Sorry to be cynical, I’m usually not, but that has been my experience.
I agree with you, but it's really hard to stop guardians from sexually abusing their kids.
I can't tell you how often I've made a referral to protective services for a child with clear signs of sexual abuse, and it goes nowhere. The agency either does nothing, or the family picks up and moves to another district. When that district catches on and reports the family, they move again.
As to the Bill in FL, I support it. The issue is not "don't say gay". It should be "don't talk about personal stuff, whether you are gay, straight, whatever." I don't remember knowing ANYTHING about the personal lives of any HS or MS teachers. Did they have children? Were they married? Did they have pets? Were they Christian? I knew none of this, and that is what we should hold up as a standard. Teachers are there to teach, not tell us how often they engaged in what sexual activity.
I shouldn’t take this bait, but it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a difference between upholding a professional culture of discretion about personal matters, and having the government outright forbid the mention of personal matters. When I was a kid, my teachers almost all kept their personal and professional lives strictly separate and avoided discussing their politics and religion in keeping with public school policy, but no one found it inappropriate for a lady teacher to simply mention the fact that she *had* a husband.
Of course, if any of my gay teachers (and, in retrospect, there were several) had simply mentioned the existence of a partner, their jobs would have been at risk, because just mentioning the existence of a partner - “My boyfriend made minestrone for dinner last night” - counted as talking about sex in a way that a lady teacher talking about her husband did not. I had teachers who came to school pregnant - nobody considered *that* a statement about their sexual activity. Teachers should be held to a high standard of professional discretion, sure, but you can’t pretend there’s not an obvious double standard here.
The bill doesn't stop them from discussing their wives and husbands or anything of the sort. It only stops instruction of these topics. From k-3.
No one should talk about their SOs in school. No one. I don't care who they are. Don't talk about the SO.
Did you read my comment? I don't believe that a female teacher mentioning that she shares a home with a person named Laura is spouting off about sexual orientation, because I don't believe a female teacher mentioning she's married to a person named Steve is spouting off about heterosexuality. I do not believe that your average four-year-old is incapable of understanding that a woman lives with another woman in the way they understand their mother and father to live together.
I'm not talking about more abstract discussions of sexual orientation/gender identity in the classroom because the commenter I responded to wasn't talking about that. The commenter I responded to said they supported the bill because they don't think any teacher should mention anything at all, ever, about their personal life in any context, implying that it's correct for the government to forbid and punish any such mention.
My point was that as it stands right now, pre-government intervention, there's a huge double standard in what counts as "discussing your personal life" depending on whether you're gay or straight. To repeat myself: I think teachers should be held to a high standard of professional discretion, but that doesn't extend to pretending that they have no family life at all, as gay teachers were expected to do throughout my entire schooling, and as the commenter I responded to seems to want them to continue to do.
I am in and out all day of five different Kindergartens. The teachers do not discuss their home lives- they don't mention husbands, wives, anything- except their own children, rarely.
Again: How does it then follow that the government should forbid and punish mention of anything personal whatsoever? I keep thinking someone’s going to argue that that’s not what the bill actually outlaws, but now it’s 3 for 3 on people who seem to think that because it is generally a good idea for teachers to keep mention of their home life out of the classroom, a bill that would chill only gay teachers’ willingness to mention their home life even incidentally must not be that bad, actually.
If on 99% of days a teacher doesn’t mention their spouse, but the very first offhand mention of that spouse can lead to professional sanction under state law, *that is a bad thing.*
I am not saying government should be involved or pass a law- not at all!! And I believe that the far left has purposely nicknamed it the "don't say gay" law because that obfuscates the real intent. The law is a poorly written over reaction. But it IS in reaction to something going on that parents don't like.
My sentiments are with Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a great piece a while ago on the "bait and switch" that some people feel has taken place.
He was very involved in the struggle for marital equality. One of the talking points was that gay marriage does not affect "the straights". Live and let live. Almost everyone got behind marriage equality, something that was once considered unthinkable.
And it was fine! Until the trans thing. Which is not a gay thing (except in that in effect transition sometimes involves sterilizing gay teenagers.)The trans ideology DOES affect straight and gay parents alike.
Now we have some schools presenting the whole gender thing to very young kids. They are being told that they change from a boy to a girl of they feel like it. Kids are being aided in transition by school officials that keep it a secret from the parents.
This bill is about Trans, not gay. That was the impetus. The trans ideology IS being pushed on our children and we don't like it.
Of course, the debate is not really about the numbers -- the numbers are just a crutch. The real debate is the duty of care accepted by each group and the betrayal of the trust that society places in them. The numbers can be high or low, that doesn't matter. What matters is the betrayal we feel, by even a handful of cases.
"Everything I’ve ever read about sex abuse suggests men are much, much more likely to be perpetrators than women"
I believe you, but I've been shocked how often women teachers are arrested for having sex with their students. There is one in the paper nearly every day.
At one point I meant to include something on this: I believe this is an example of the availability heuristic -- basically, we sometimes overestimate events that are rare but attention-getting. A female teacher having sex with a male student is ALWAYS going to get attention, in part *because* it is a reversal of the usual abuse scenario. I think that might cause us to believe these incidents are more common than they are (especially since we live in a very big country where even rare events pop up with some frequency).
BUT if there are specific stats on this I'm open to being convinced it's a bigger problem than I think.
It creates a much stronger tabloid draw, too. The male teacher with the female students is predatory, the female teacher with the male students is scandalous. It shouldn't really be that way, but our culture is what it is.
Plus all the cultural complications of defining consent. Society views 1) "attractive 20 year old female teacher has sex with 17 year old male student" very differently from 2) "attractive 20 year old male teacher has sex with 17 year old female student", and very very differently from 3) "attractive 20 year old male teacher has sex with 17 year old male student" (the female-female circumstance is rare enough to lack tropes.) I'd suspect the police would be most likely to be called in situation 3, then situation 2, and least likely in situation 1. Those numbers would offset somewhat the availability heuristic, and further complicate the data analysis.
Not to mention that to many grown adult men hazily remembering their own horny adolescence, it’s a tittilating fantasy to imagine having had sex with a teacher. Particularly if the teacher is conventionally attractive/younger than they are now.
That is its own category of sex story: the young teacher who seduces, or is seduced by, her good-looking male student (oh so I've heard ....)
I think those become big stories because of how rare it is, although men are much less likely (my personal experience) to understand an extreme imbalance of power as rape. I was in a survivor’s group once (going to fudge details a bit here even though I’m anonymous) and this guy told one of the worst stories I’ve ever heard in my life about four of his older cousins doing the most heinous shit you can imagine and then ended it with “but that wasn’t rape, just kids messing around, and I wouldn’t be here if my wife wasn’t about to leave me.”
The power imbalance thing it hard for me, sometimes. People have all kinds of different power, and I don't think all power imbalances barr a sexual relationship.
There are obviously gray cases to everything but a four year old obviously has no meaningful overlap with a seventeen year old. If you can withstand a bunch of sperging out about machine intelligence I have a whole philosophy on this in my substack.
Basically, you need enough power parity that all parties are able to see and understand roughly the same futures.
To build off Jesse's point, about 25 people are struck and killed by lightning each year in the US. Due to weather they're not evenly distributed throughout the year, but if they were and if they received national news attention every time it happened, you'd hear about it about once every two weeks despite it being a rare occurrence.
If Jesse's numbers above are correct, there are around 2.6 million female teachers in the US. If 1% of them are abusers, that's around 26,000 teachers. Things can be statistically rare and still common when you get large populations.
Hi Jesse, in the past I have contributed a very few dollars to Rufo's work.
I forwarded your twitter thread to his assistant detailing that I am subscriber of yours and the honesty and integrity of your work.
I hope there is a clarification from him and the Manhattan Institute. Thank you......
Another complicating factor would be the inclusion of nuns into the analysis. Nuns are also members of the church even if they cannot say mass. You could focus your analysis by only comparing the male/male abuse or just adding nuns to the figure. Another interesting comparison point would be checking on the differences between catholic schools v. public schools. In some catholic schools, there is going to be a fair amount of overlap in the category of priest/teacher and nun/teacher.
I can't remember a single story in which a nun emerges as a perpetrator of sexual abuse. As victims (of priests), surprisingly common, especially in Africa and Asia. As perpetrators of physical and emotional abuse, yes, often. But in — oh God — nearly forty years of writing about religion I don't remember a single news story of a nun as a perpetrator of _sexual_ abuse.
Some survivors of Indian Residential Schools in Canada have accused nuns of sexual abuse. In most cases the alleged perpetrators are long dead.
"None of this means these right-wing beliefs are entirely false."
It's like you knew what I was going to copy, paste, and complain about.
The Fifth Column podcast episode with Rufo is one of the best they've ever done. He made some good points, but you can tell he expected a friendly, fawning interview and was caught off guard by tough questions.
I can't say I'm surprised to see Rufo on the express train to Lindsayville these days.
Totally. TFC interview was the first time I had ever heard of Rufo (or maybe the second, whatever) and I totally got the vibe that he was caught flat-footed.
omg yes!! that was the most fascinating (and infuriating) part of Jesse's piece! Absolutely bonkers.
I have worked with a few astonishingly bad teachers, and is beyond dispiriting that we can't get rid of them.
Substackolist!