From WND:Nearly 10 percent of students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees, the best available data indicates, according to Shakeshaft. [a professor at Hofstra] The mistreatment ranges from sexual comments to rape, says the report, titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature.”
“So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft asked, according to Education Week. She notes the recently released study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops found 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests from 1950 to 2002. She compares that with her extrapolation from a national survey for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000, which would indicate roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee from 1991 to 2000.
That is a single decade, she points out, compared to the approximately five decades covered by the Catholic report. The figures suggest that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,” said Shakeshaft, according to the education magazine.
I am as virulent a critic of the public schools as they come – I think they should be abolished, the buildings torn down and every professional non-teaching educator and member of the NEA forcibly deported to Cuba – but even I find this very hard to believe. Unless “you look nice today, Amanda” somehow qualifies as sexual comments. But if it proves to be true, then there’s just one more reason to pull your kids out, as if inserting them into an institution designed to stunt their intellectual development wasn’t reason enough.