Out of about 8,000 witnesses who appealed to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 31.6 percent of the survivors were abused in school, and 21.6 percent of the identified perpetrators were teachers.
Sadly, such cases are all too common, not only in Australia but in other parts of the west including the UK and the USA. The stories are all too common and run along very similar lines.
Those lines include grooming behaviour where trust is gained and then betrayed. Perhaps the more surprising elements of these cases where the high number of adult women who perpetrated the crimes on younger boys.
Below are some of the more egregious cases to date
1. Tad Cummins
Fifty-year-old Tad Cummins’s career ended soon after he was spotted holding hands with and kissing Elizabeth Thomas, who was only 15 at the time of the incident. The former teacher then kidnapped the teen, taking her all the way from her home in Tennessee to a remote cabin in northern California.
Thomas was safely returned home more than a month later, and Cummins was charged with aggravated kidnapping and sexual contact with a minor.
2. Stacey Dean Rambold
In September 2014, a 50-year-old Billings Senior High School teacher violated his parole and was sentenced to a 10-year prison term, one year after he completed his one-month jail term for raping Cherice Moralez in 2007.
Judge G. Todd Baugh had placed blame on the victim during Stacey Dean Rambold’s initial sentencing hearing, saying the teen “appeared older than her chronological age.”
Moralez was so emotionally affected by the encounter that she committed suicide in 2010 while the case was still pending.
3. Mary Kay Letourneau
Not only was Mary Kay Letourneau charged with second-degree rape of her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau, she also gave birth to the boy’s child while awaiting her sentence.
Letourneau was sentenced to six months in jail along with three months suspension from her career and no contact with Fualaau for life. But the former teacher was soon caught violating her terms when she was found in a car with Fualaau.
Letourneau then was sentenced up to seven years in prison, and she gave birth to a second daughter while she was serving her sentence. She ended up marrying Fualaau, who was by then of adult age, after she was released in 2004.
4. Pamela Rogers Turner
By 4 Feb. 2005, Pamela Rogers Turner faced 15 counts of sexual battery and 13 counts of statutory rape. While she was 27, she had a three-month relationship with a 13-year-old boy, a student at Centertown Elementary School where she taught.
Turner pled guilty to sending nudes and explicit videos to her victims and requested local incarceration with therapy, a request that was declined since she showed no remorse or intention to rehabilitate.
5. Brittni Colleps
Brittni Colleps was recorded having group sex with four students aged 18 and 19 in her home. The teacher later claimed she felt victimised because she did not consent to the video recording.
Even though all four of the students involved were of the age of consent, Colleps was still convicted of 16 counts of improper teacher-student relationship since the local law dictated no educator in primary or secondary school should be in a sexual relationship with any enrolled students.
6. James Madison High School
Five teachers were accused of sexual misconduct within six years at what became popularly known as “Horndog High.”. Robert Cain, for one, brought a student to a Brooklyn Comfort Inn over a two-month duration and had sex with her daily.
Two teachers, Erin Sayar and Allison Musacchio, were also found having sexual relationships with their students. Another two female teachers were also found half-naked in a janitor’s closet in an inappropriate position.
7. Gerald Ridsdale
Father Gerald Ridsdale, labelled as the worst paedophile in Australian history, was said to have molested every single boy between 10 and 16 years old while serving as a parish priest in a Mortlake school.
For several years, Risdale also operated a paedophile ring with two other child sexual predators around Ballarat, a city located near Melbourne. He has been serving his sentence in jail since 1994.
Image via Pixabay CC0 License
Daryl Green