(female) Teacher penalized for having sex with (male) student

Waco Tribune-Herald ^ | Aug 1, 2002 | Tommy Witherspoon

[gcruse]

 to establish the under-age female’s consent is way too problematic

Why is that?  If she was willing, it was consensual.  If she, at that
tender an age, lacked the maturity to give consent, how, then, can
a boy of the same age give his consent?

[macamadamia]

To say, “If she was willing, it was consensual” is circular reasoning. How do we KNOW without a doubt that she is willing? Conversely, a “boy of the same age” engaging in coitus must, ipso facto, be consenting. I hate to be frank but is it possible for a male to be erect and engaging in sexual intercourse if he sincerely does not want to?

[gcruse]

 
To say, “If she was willing, it was consensual” is circular reasoning.

I don't see the problem.  If she said, "Yes, I want to," it was willing.
Therefore, it was consensual.  However, statutorily, the reasoning
goes, she was not mature enough to know what she was doing.
At that same age, even though he can perform, the boy is
said not to be able to give legal consent either.

So, if it is rape for one, it should be rape for both, legally.
In reality, consent is consent, so neither should be rape.

[macamadamia]

The problem is that a claim of willingness on the girl’s part is simply poor evidence. How do we know she hasn’t changed her mind, and changed her mind for dubious reasons? There has to be a reasonable limit when gauging intentions—it’s a path fraught with problems. We can never know for certain what really happened. Rightly so, the law assumes a minor cannot make the best decision, so it is automatically considered rape. However, I’m taking the view (I confess I must be hopelessly sexist) that it is far worse when an adult male engages a girl in sex. I think males and females are profoundly different and the dynamics, the psychology and physical strength, is substantially different in the two scenarios.

[gcruse]

 However, I’m taking the view (I confess I must be hopelessly sexist)
that it is far worse when an adult male engages a girl in sex.

To me, treating them differently is sexist, an offshoot of
'boys will be boys' ;  the idea that it is worse for the
wife to fool around in the marriage than the husband.

Oh, well, I know I'm bloody literal-minded and that
may be why I think the law should be gender-neutral.
Isn't that what the blindfold is for?  :)

[ValerieUSA]

Consent is only consent if it is granted by a consenting adult of legal age of consent. Under-aged consent is not consent.

Here's a recent case in Washington state, though the teacher's victim was a friend of her children rather than her student:

Teacher gets five years for child rape, molestation

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/723089/posts

[gcruse]

 

Consent is only consent if it is granted by a consenting
adult of legal age of consent. Under-aged consent is not consent.

Whether it be boy or girl, aye.  Hence, rape is rape.
Yet the penalty phase is more likely to weigh heavier
against the male.

[supercat]

Obviously, the courts don't either. As for the logic of it all, it passes me by.

A girl who has sex with a man risks becoming pregnant. A boy who has sex with a woman does not. While the woman may become pregnant, that does not victimize the boy as much as a girl's becoming pregnant would victimize her.

[supercat]

To me, treating them differently is sexist, an offshoot of 'boys will be boys' ; the idea that it is worse for the wife to fool around in the marriage than the husband.

Bliblically, it is worse for the wife to screw around than the husband. The former is punishable by death; the latter is derided as foolish and yet no punishment is specified. While this might seem sexist, there is a very sound biological reason for it.

If a wife sleeps with a man other than her husband, her husband will have no way of knowing what children are his. By contrast, no matter what a woman's husband does she'll always know which children are hers.

[ValerieUSA]

follow up

Ex-Waco High teacher who had sex with student was fired from another teaching job

By TOMMY WITHERSPOON Tribune-Herald staff writer

The former Waco High School math teacher who had sex with a student last year was fired from her first teaching job in Brady for having improper physical contact with an 18-year-old student.

Amber Leigh Wolfshohl, 26, was placed on deferred probation for 10 years last week after pleading guilty to sexual assault, a second-degree felony. Wolfshohl had sex with a 16-year-old Waco High School student at her apartment in January 2001 and then told at least four of her other students about it.

She was required to surrender her state teaching certificate and will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of her life.

Three years ago, Wolfshohl, then Amber Holubec, was newly married, fresh out of Angelo State University and looking for a teaching job.

Her former husband and his family are from Melvin, a small community near Brady, and Wolfshohl got a job in January 1999 to replace a science teacher at Brady High School who became ill at mid-year.

She wasn't much older than some of her students and it didn't take long for rumors about her and a popular senior athlete to begin circulating through the school and around Brady, a town of about 6,100 people about 135 miles southwest of Waco.

"Basically, her conduct with a student was causing quite a disturbance in the community," said Brady High School principal Preasley Cooper. "Her conduct was not acceptable. In this town, everybody knows everybody else's business and there is a lot of gossip. Some of it was true and some of it probably was not true. It's true the boy was 18 and of legal age. But he was a student, and morally, her actions were wrong."

The boy and his parents were humiliated and angry, like the Waco youth, who also is a gifted athlete, and his family. Both boys and their families wanted the matters handled discreetly and with as little public attention as possible, said Cooper and Beth Toben, the McLennan County prosecutor who handled Wolfshohl's case in Waco.

"The boy went to his parents and they came to us," Cooper said. "They didn't go into a lot of detail. They simply informed us that there was a problem that involved their son and they didn't feel that it was appropriate and they didn't want it to continue but they didn't know what to do or how to stop it. They asked us to do what we could to stop it. They wanted us to handle it very delicately."

Brady Superintendent Max Gordon said that while the boy's family and his investigation revealed that Wolfshohl and the boy didn't have sexual relations, the teacher's behavior forced them to fire her before the semester was over.

"It was a situation where she was tutoring a young man, a high school boy, and our investigation showed there was more than just tutoring going on and probably some inappropriate touching and things like that," Gordon said. "But that was as far as it went, as far as we know. Once we were made aware of it, she never went back to the classroom."

When Wolfshohl was fired, that quickened the pace of the community rumor mill and likely contributed to Wolfshohl's divorce from Cole Holubec, Gordon and Cooper said.

"Needless to say, when we terminate a teacher in this community and someone leaves, people naturally are going to wonder what is going on and are going to talk," Gordon said.

Wolfshohl, who has remarried and is expecting a baby in less than a month, declined comment this week.

With such a blemish on her resume just months into her young teaching career, how did she wind up getting a job at Brazos Middle School in Waco and transferring to Waco High the next year?

Cooper, Gordon and a Brady High School employee who said she has fielded most all incoming calls there for years all said that they do not remember anyone from the Waco school system calling there to check Wolfshohl's references.

If they had, Cooper and Gordon both said that they would have been honest about Wolfshohl and her short-lived career at Brady High School.

"I try to be honest," Gordon said. "If someone had called me about her, I would have told them that there was a problem with her and a student and that she was asked to leave and didn't finish out the semester. I just feel like you need to make people aware of things like that."

Brazos Middle School principal Veronica Sharp hired Wolfshohl to teach seventh-grade math in the summer of 1999. She said the district did a criminal background check and that she personally checked at least two of Wolfshohl's references, including officials at the Brady school district.

While Sharp said she does not remember to which Brady school official she spoke, she said her handwritten notation on Wolfshohl's job application shows she called Brady schools at 3:30 p.m. on June 30, 1999. Had there been any mention that she had been fired or anything else to "raise red flags," Sharp said she likely would not have considered her application.

As Sharp reviewed Wolfshohl's job application, she noted that Wolfshohl checked "no" when asked if her teaching contract had ever not been renewed.

"She was a real good teacher here," Sharp said. "I don't know what happened when she went to the high school, but I hated to lose her. She was creative and I never had any problem with her and her students."

Waco High School principal Molly Maloy said she heard "rumors" about why Wolfshohl left Brady after she was arrested in the sexual assault. Maloy said Wolfshohl already was teaching at the school when she became principal.

Sharp said she was not aware why Wolfshohl left her job at Brady.

"Sometimes when you call, people don't really tell you what you really need to hear because they are afraid of getting sued or they are trying to get them off their hands or whatever," Sharp said. "I would hope that people would be honest about things like that. But if I had heard then what you are telling me now, she would have never even been considered."

Waco Superintendent Jerry Major said the school system has policies and procedures in place to adequately check a prospective teacher's background, adding that he is sure those policies are being adhered to.

"We run all the traps that we can run and certainly do as much as we can to investigate background," Major said. "I am confident we are doing all we can do to get the kind of people in here that we want and expect to get in here."

Prosecutor Toben said she was aware of the Brady incident when she recommended deferred probation for Wolfshohl.

"I seriously took into consideration the desires of the victim and the victim's family in this case, and they did not want to go to trial," Toben said. "They didn't want the facts and his name and all the rest made public. They didn't want it because it can affect the students at school, the way they are treated by other students and the way they are treated by other school parents. They did not want any repercussions from this. They wanted him to succeed at school. He's a good kid and after he did it, he felt dirty and ashamed of himself. He had a lot of guilt."

[ValerieUSA]

Here's a picture of the teacher in question - she looks young, but has destroyed her career and is on her second marriage now. She's a predator.

[martin_fierro]

I initially confused this story with others because there's a LOT of this "woman-teacher-rapes-boy-student" stuff going on these days. It's not just LeTourneau anymore:

Fallen a long way (Female teacher convicted of sex crimes aginst young boy)

Teacher gets five years for child rape, molestation

(but then, you already knew that) <|:)~