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Out of Bounds: Sexual abuse by coaches violation of athletes, their trust By Keener A. Tippin II
Your young daughter has a basketball "jones." She absolutely loves the game. She eats, drinks and sleeps it. She spends hours at a time outside in your driveway dribbling the "rock" and shooting hoops. When she's not playing, she gobbles up anything she can find to read about the sport. No frilly dresses for her, just the replica jersey of her favorite WNBA, NBA or college basketball player. She pleads for you to sign her up to play for a team but you drag your feet. A coach for a local competitive team sees her playing basketball in the schoolyard during recess and invites her to join his team. You're overjoyed. She doesn't have many friends and her self-esteem isn't the greatest in the world. This will give her a chance to build her confidence, participate in a sport she loves plus perhaps make new friends. Still, you have reservations. The coach seems nice enough. Boyish looks. Charming. Says the right things. Appears to have a good knowledge of the game. His teams have done quite well in local, state and national competitions. The list of players who have played for him and gone on to play on the high school team and to receive college scholarships is quite impressive. But what do you really know about him? You feel compelled to do your homework into the coach's background. And with good reason, too. Your future All-American's coach may have something other than playbook Xs and Os on his mind. An estimated 15,000 convicted sexual offenders currently coach kids in out-of-school sports, according to Southeastern Security Consultants, a Marietta, Ga.-based company that specializes in background screenings for youth-league coaches. Need proof? * Last August a jury in California found a soccer-league commissioner guilty of molesting four boys. * In October 2002, a soccer coach in New York was convicted of improperly touching an 11-year-old boy and showing him pornographic movies. * In 1999 a high school football coach in Texas pleaded guilty to charges of sexual assault for a series of sexual encounters with a 16-year-old female student. * A study by the Houston Chronicle identified 64 Texas high school and middle school coaches who lost their jobs through termination, resignation or reassignment as a result of alleged sexual misconduct involving students or other minors between December 1996 and February 2001. * A 1998 Education Week search of newspaper archives and computer databases found 244 cases in a six-month period involving allegations ranging from unwanted touching to sexual relationships.
"If you are in a science classroom and you just see the child for one hour a day, you have less frequent opportunity than if you are the coach and you see the kid everyday for three hours and go on trips and sometimes stay overnight out of town with the child," said Shoop, a professor of educational administration and an educational law expert. But that's not to say your kids are any safer in school classrooms. Reported incidents of teacher-student sex cases are becoming more and more common. Shoop said that these cases are probably the tip of the iceberg in regards to the number of cases; however, no national studies exist to discuss how prevalent a problem it truly is. Yet, he said the scandal is comparable in magnitude to (but has been overshadowed by) the incidents of alleged abuse committed by priests in the Catholic Church. "In the last five years, there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases of children or adults who are reporting things that happened when they were a child," Shoop said. "There were almost no reports of those events during the time that children actually were abused." "The same thing's happening in schools -- there's a proliferation of reporting right now," he continued. "You can hardly go a day without reading in some community some child is now bringing a case against a teacher for sexual exploitation." Shoop said there is some belief that reports of abuse are becoming more frequent because of the publicity and the likelihood that they will be believed. According to Shoop, this sexual exploitation or inappropriate relationship between a coach and athlete can include sexual harassment which comes in the form of either quid pro quo, which means the teacher actually propositions the student and has sexual intercourse, to what's called hostile environment which includes inappropriate touching, sexual comments, sexual language or showing the student sexual materials. Sexual molestation typically means having sexual intercourse with a child and the "child" is defined in each state by specific age. Shoop said often a power paradigm is involved, with the coach having some sort of authority over the student or athlete, creating an internal conflict within the student and making it difficult to resist that kind of power. Often, fear is also a method used. "In many of the cases, teachers or coaches have been arrested and it's determined that they have been having sexual intercourse with children for 15 or 20 years and nobody ever reported it before until one child finally comes forward," Shoop said. "Once that child reports it, very frequently a whole series of other people come forward saying 'yeah, he did that to me too and I was afraid,' or 'he did that to me too and he told me if I told anyone he would hurt me or hurt my family' or so on." Shoop said although the vast majority of abuse cases occur between male teachers or coaches and female student athletes, female teacher to male student and same sex abuse from student to teacher can occur as well. He said female teacher to male student abuse occurs probably 5 percent of the time or less, but receives a lot of publicity disproportionate to the percentage. He cites the highly publicized case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her 13-year-old lover or that of Tanya Hadden, a 33-year-old California high school teacher who went to Las Vegas with a 15-year-old male student. "Those two cases received national news coverage for weeks where the case of the male having sex with the female student often receives one news story in a local paper and then isn't picked up on a national wire," Shoop said. "But the molestation of female teacher to male student is somewhat different than that of a male teacher typically to a female student." Shoop said this "double standard" is also apparent in sentencing of offenders as well. He said a male arrested for having sex with a female student is typically sentenced between 10 and 20 years in prison; a female arrested for having sex with a male student often receives probation or significantly less jail time. "The difference still seems that society has a double standard in that a woman is to be protected from sexual activity but a man is supposed to want, desire and benefit from sexual activity," Shoop said. According to Shoop, 20 or 30 years ago, if a female teacher was having sex with a male teenage student, chances are the father would visit the teacher and encourage her to put an end to the trysts; others would congratulate the youth's sexual conquest with an older woman. Shoop said still today, society in general doesn’t understand the harm that occurs to a child -- both male and female -- abused by a person in power. "Even now, there's a recent case where a judge basically said that there wasn't really any harm done," Shoop said. "I think the idea of a man raping a woman is pretty well agreed upon as an egregious event. But a woman raping a boy for some people it's hard to imagine that that actually could occur. And the difficulty is, is because people don't understand that power paradigm and how the teacher has so much power over the child in these molestation cases they almost never occur with physical violence or somebody dragging a person into a room and raping them. It frequently occurs where the relationship develops over a period of months through a cultivating and grooming process so that by the time intercourse actually occurs the child believes that it's in their best interest and doesn't really understand that they are being abused." Shoop said it is dangerous to stereotype predators because any teacher can be a predator; not one mold fits all. However, one general criteria that most have is they are frequently very popular, charming, gregarious, vivacious people who are often very good teachers and very good coaches. "That doesn't mean that good coaches molest children," Shoop cautions, "but it means if you are a popular teacher, you are above suspicion and you can get away with a lot of behavior because people just assume you are a good guy or a good woman. Plus, children look up to you and respect you and defer to you and it's very traditional." While there are no general characteristics among perpetrators, there is a common thread among their victims: Low self-esteem. Victims are often not the star quarterback from the football team or the basketball team's star center, but instead students who lack self-confidence are more vulnerable to flattery and a teacher's positive interaction. "There is some data that says the perpetrator does not pick a child who rejects their first contact," Shoop said. "In other words the first contact that the teacher makes with that child is usually less overt by putting a hand on them or talking to them in an inappropriate way. If that kid says, 'hey back off' or 'don't do that' or just walks away that teacher will find another victim. But if that child doesn't resist and doesn't stand up for himself, the teacher will escalate that behavior. "Children who are assertive, who know appropriate behavior and know that no one has the right to touch them or to have a sexual relationship with them, are much more likely to defend themselves," Shoop continued. "Children who lack self confidence are more vulnerable to flattery and a teacher's positive interaction." Shoop is regularly consulted on issues pertaining to educational law, risk management and sexual harassment prevention. He is the author or co-author of 14 books including "Sexual Exploitation in Schools: How to Spot it and Stop it" and more than 100 journal articles, monographs and book chapters about legal issues. He has also produced award-winning video programs designed to eliminate sexual harassment in public schools and businesses. Summer 2003 |
According
to Robert Shoop, a Kansas State University expert who has studied sexual
harassment and abuse in schools, this abuse isn't just limited to coaches.
Band directors, music teachers or anybody who has access to your child
in a private environment outside of the school setting could also be a
predator as well. Unfortunately, the inordinate amount of time spent practicing
for these extracurricular activities gives these abusers much greater
access to your child than that by regular teachers.