It’s like a pandemic: Weekly news reports of yet another teacher arrested for having an erotic relationship with a student – often a young, attractive female exploiting a teen male under the age of consent.
But this phenomenon of “educator sexual misconduct,” or ESM, is not as bad as it appears.
In fact, it’s worse.
Such stories evoke the prurient pop music theme found in the rock band Van Halen’s 1984 tune “Hot For Teacher.”
However, in the real world, the overwhelming majority of these criminal relationships are never disclosed and prosecuted, and their destructive impact on victims goes largely unreported.
It was “traumatic,” said Grant Strickland, a Greenville, North Carolina teen, one of the few boys to speak out years after a 33-year-old teacher Nicole Callaham allegedly groomed him in 2021 at age 14 with alcohol and marijuana into a two-year sexual relationship.
“I would never want someone to go through with what I went through,” he told reporters following a court hearing of his alleged abuser. “Because I don’t think most people would be showing up to survive it. Because I almost didn’t.”
In fact, exclusive interviews with leading researchers and forensic psychologists on the subject and an investigation by Breitbart News into the data reveals into that such sexual abuse is both underreported and understudied — despite being what one researcher called “a serious public health concern.”
The causes range from teacher shortages to undetected personality disorders in educators to what clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has called the collapse of Western values and the embrace of “subjective morality,” inflamed by an online world where anything goes.
As for the numbers and trends, the Department of Education (DOE) study of 50 million students in nearly all of the 100,000 schools in the U.S., updated in 2022, showed a nearly 100 percent increase in educator rape or attempted rape since an earlier study published in 2004.
That statistic actually underestimates problem because only six percent of student victims disclose what they experience, a previous DOE study revealed.
“It’s definitely underreported,” leading researcher Charol Shakeshaft recently told Breitbart News.
Shakeshaft has been studying the problem for four decades and is considered the nation’s leading expert on the issue, having authored the 2004 landmark study for the DOE under the Bush administration. It was Shakeshaft who formulated the six percent rate.
“It’s under underreported because a kid feels ashamed, like it was their fault,” the Virginia Commonwealth University department chair and professor emeritus explained. “It’s very common for [the perpetrator] to make the kid believe ‘if you wouldn’t be so sexy, if you wouldn’t always be acting this way, I wouldn’t be doing this.’ These are adults who have good shaming and good grooming language.”
Even with the under reporting, the spate of recent cases grabbing national headlines in the past six months defy being limited to any community or particular demographic.
A partial sampling of these stories covered by Breitbart News in the past six months include:
- A Southern California woman, 36, goes from “teacher of the year” to a 30-years-to-life prison term for sexually abusing two of her sixth-grade students.
- A 37-year-old female teacher in the Jersey Shore is sentenced to prison for grooming two students and then having sex with them in various locations, including her family’s bagel shop.
- A 30-year-old substitute teacher Missouri receives a decade in prison for essentially turning her rural middle school students into male prostitutes, paying them for sex and rewarding them with drugs and alcohol.
- In Wisconsin, two female teachers, both 25, face charges, one for allegedly having sex with a 13-year-old boy while her colleague is accused of sexual assault on a 15-year-old.
- The 28-year-old the daughter of the mayor of a tiny Oklahoma town of hardly 700 people — the young woman also the wife of the town’s police chief — is sentenced to prison for soliciting sex from a 15-year-old student.
- A male teacher, 39, at an elite Brooklyn school prepping students for the Ivy League is serving time for engaging 13 to 15-year-old students in sexual conversations and obtaining from them nude photos and videos.
Shakeshaft was sounding the alarm 20 years ago. But the mainstream news media largely ignored her stunning findings and focused on condemning the Catholic Church.
“Think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft told the National Review in 2006. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
While it’s the female teachers who make the headlines, that coverage is deceiving, according to Shakeshaft’s study and other research done by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
While academic teachers commit 63 percent of the abuse, followed by coaches and gym teachers at 20 percent, 85 percent of offenders were male. Nearly three quarters of victims were female.
Shakeshaft believes women grab the headlines because tabloid-style news outlets focus on the salacious value like that in the Van Halen video for clicks and readership.
One New York tabloid recently used a young married teacher’s move to another state as an excuse to dredge up the teacher’s 2022 Washington case and report in nearly pornographic detail the “depraved, hours long sex marathon” she had with a 17-year-old.
“It feels like voyeurism,” Shakeshaft said of much of the reporting. “It’s not like they’re reporting a crime.”
She continued, “And we minimize the danger — the harm and danger to boys — because we make it seem as if there’s some kind of conquest. Like this is just some kind of gift to boys.”
Grant Strickland, the boy who courageously spoke out in North Carolina, met his abuser at a theatrical audition, winning a part in a school play the teacher was directing. The grooming allegedly began with her picking him up for rehearsals.
“I had to grow up very, very fast and get onto a whole other maturity level I was never ready for and shouldn’t have had to been,” Strickland said.
“Just because I’m a man doesn’t mean it should be shunned away,” he also said. “’Cause I was a child. I wasn’t a man. I was a boy.”
John Jay College psychologist Elizabeth L. Jeglic, the United States’ other leading expert on the topic, agrees that little attention has been paid to both the short-term and long-term impact on boys.
The psychologist and her team have updated what she called “rampant” sexual misconduct numbers for this decade, focused on the psychopathology and grooming behaviors of the educators and, like Shakeshaft, also proposed ways to detect and stop offenders.
Jeglic found that more than one in ten students underwent “at least one form of educator sexual misconduct” during their school years. That’s some 500,000 U.S. students in any given year.
When it comes to teacher-student sexual activity secondary schools, Jeglic theorized that incidents may have increased because of teacher shortages in the COVID era and the hiring of young teachers in their early 20s to teach middle and high school students.
“We’re seeing a lot of young teachers where there’s not a huge age difference between the teacher and the student,” she told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview. “It’s still an adult and a child, right? But the age difference is not as strict, and they may not be as aware of boundary violations as previous generations.”
Female perpetrators often can have not-easily-detected mental conditions such as being bipolar or having borderline or narcissistic personality disorders.
“We’re seeing with younger women, when compared to men, more mental health issues in general,” she explained. “But that doesn’t mean, you know, that somebody who has a mental health issue is going to be a perpetrator. But that’s generally the extent of profile that we’re seeing.”
The researcher also said the absence of cases being reported in the media where a male educator is the offender is partly a function of teenage girl’s perception of what happened to them.
“The majority of girls who are abused are abused in high school, and they believe at the time that they are in a consensual relationship with the perpetrator,” she explained. “So that delays disclosure until they’re adults. And then the story is not as big when they come forward.”
Jeglic’s team also identified a prevention gap for same-sex female victims, as was the case in with a 23-year-old biology teacher in a Catholic all-girls school in New Orleans who was arrested in February for allegedly becoming sexually involved with one of her teenage students.
“We are seeing a subsection — less than five percent of cases — of a female on female,” she said. “That is especially difficult because there’s really nothing written on it. So, girls don’t necessarily even know if this is an abusive situation or what to do about it because so little out there on this type of crime. “
Michael Abramsky, a Michigan forensic psychologist who has evaluated some 1,000 convicted criminals for sentencing, has found in his evaluations and testing that male educators who sexually abuse their students fall into one of three categories.
“Some are real pedophiles, men who are only attracted to kids,” he explains. “They’ve never graduated to adult psychosexual development. Some are psychopaths. They have anti-social tendencies and are practiced in lying, stealing, and even murder. And some, this is the third category, are the regressed.”
By “regression” he means adults who normally have no tendencies to become involved with teenagers, but when under certain stressful life events — sometimes problems in their marriage – they regress to the state of mind of their youth.
“I had a guy who was married with five kids,” Abramsky told Breitbart News. “He’d never had any problems at all. But for reasons, dynamic reasons, he regressed. In these cases they go back to a time in their life in psychosexual development when they were the same age as these kids.”
Educator sexual misconduct cases are initiated and enabled by grooming behaviors.
Researcher Jeglic says that her team’s research shows that in all cases male and females educators groom their victims, but they use different methods depending on the gender.
“It’s important to recognize that that women can also be perpetrators,” she explained. “Our research does show is that the grooming behaviors that they use are more overtly sexual, such as exposing their naked bodies and talking about sexual topics. Um, which, again, along with that stereotype is potentially attractive to young males.”
“Men, especially with adolescent females tend to use like relational tactics, like choose women, or girls who are, you know, insecure or have low self-esteem, and then they convince them that they’re in a consensual relationship. They give them attention and then get them to fall in love with them,” Jeglic added.
Both Jeglic and Shakeshaft have produced academic literature that promotes detecting grooming as the key to prevention.
They say that the key to stopping this form of sexual abuse is to teach faculty, administrators, and other school officials how to recognize grooming behaviors and establish new rules to prevent it.
Shakeshaft, in her 2024 book Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It, writes that school cultures and institutional structures are often complicit.
School cultures of permissiveness can play a part, she said, perhaps evidenced by the case of the two abusive teachers in Wisconsin who joined in the practice of student sexual exploitation instead of reporting each other.
Or, abuse can flourish where there is a lack of scrutiny like the kind found in the private prep school in Brooklyn which apparently overlooked the teacher’s previous felony record and accused parents of being “racist” or “not progressive” for their concerns about the convicted math teacher of Asian descent.
Both researchers say school personnel and students themselves must be taught to spot the “red flags” of grooming behaviors like special attention, gift giving, and time spent together outside of the school as the perpetrator establishes an exclusive one-on-one relationship with a student, which is sometimes called “boundary crossing behaviors” or BCBs.
Shakeshaft’s most recent study, however, shows that four percent of school employees who suspected educator sex abuse decide not to report.
“They’re afraid that they don’t really know that it’s true or are reluctant to pass on rumors,” she said. “They don’t want to take the chance [of reporting a colleague] because relationships in schools are pretty important to get things done.”
The good news, though, is that training programs are making some headway. Shakeshaft said a key factor is if school personnel “trusts” how school administrators will handle reports of “potential ESM and BCB.”
“We looked at training to see if training had changed attitudes and change belief systems,” she said. “The results were pretty strong. The people that it helped were the people who were the bystanders, who came to understand that when they see certain things happening – report that.”
Jeglic said her team found that students also can be easily enlightened.
“We just did a study that we’re about to publish on training kids to detect grooming behaviors,” she said. “And the research shows that kids can improve their grooming detection if they receive training on what grooming is and the specific behaviors.”
One of the tragedies of the educator sexual misconduct pandemic is that perhaps is bringing an end to the legitimate relationships students had with coaches and teachers who in the past inspired students by taking a personal interest in them, often beyond school hours.
“I hate to say a bad apple [spoils the batch],” Jeglic said. “But we know these risk factors. And we have to maintain those boundaries now for the protection of the child.”
Veteran crime writer Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
