N.J. Teacher Charged with Sexaul Assault (Here we go again)

Riverside, N.J., Feb. 21, 2005 — Sources say the 14-year-old boy having an affair with a teacher is cooperating with police, but is reluctant to divulge details for fear of getting her in more trouble. Action News has been told the boy is in love with the teacher, who is ten years older, and that the two even talked of marriage.

Gail Nottie/STORE OWNER: "I can't understand it, I can't see what a women would see in a child."

People are still in shock about the arrest Friday of a substitute teacher at Riverside High School for allegedly having an affair with a fourteen-year-old student.

Twenty-four-year-old Angela Stellwag, the daughter of Delran Mayor Joseph Stellwag, has been charged with sexual assault. Police say the two met in 2003 at Beverly City school when he was an eighth grader, and Stellwag was a substitute. Students there say there was lots of talk.

Mychalynn Bryant/STUDENT: "He would always stay after school with her and like people just started getting suspicious."

Gabrielle Hensley/Student: "One time I was at Sub Shack and I seen them up there, and they were making out in the car, and 'Wow'."

Efforts to contact Stellwag and her attorney were unsuccessful authorities have seized e-mails and love notes between the teacher and teen as evidence.

Attorney Mike Riley represent the boy and his family and says the fourteen-year-old is having a difficult time.

Mike Riley/VICTIM'S ATTORNEY: "The young man is not in a position where he has the legal capacity to give legal consent.... The shock of this relationship being exposed, the intense news interest in the relationship, the fact that he obviously has feelings for this young lady. It's a very distressing and disturbing situation he finds himself in."

At the deli down the street from Riverside High, people are shaking their heads.

Sal Notte/STORE OWNER: "Now whether she's guilty or not, I don't want to judge anybody, but it's just a horrible thing that happened."

Educator Sexual Abuse Statistics

A 2003 study of sexual harassment in secondary schools found that 27 percent of sexual harassment of students was conducted by adult school employees. Teachers comprised 81 percent of the offending group. (Timmerman, G. 2003. "Sexual Harassment of Adolescents Perpetrated by Teachers and by Peers: An exploration of the Dynamics of Power, Culture, and Gender in Secondary School." )

The best estimate is that 15% of students will be sexually abused by a member of the school staff during their school career.
The number of K-12 public and private school students in 1996 who have been or will be sexually abused by a member of the school staff is nearly 7 million of 51,331,000.
Between 1% and 5% of teachers sexually abuse or harass students.
At least a quarter of all school districts in the United States have dealt with a case of staff sexual abuse in the past ten years.
Most cases of sexual abuse of students by teachers are never reported.
Responses to Allegations of Sexual Abuse of Students by Staff

38.7% of the teachers resigned, left the district, or retired
17.5% were spoken to informally
15% were terminated or not re-hired
11.3% received a formal verbal or written reprimand
8.1% were suspended and then resumed teaching
7.5% were cases where the superintendent determined that the teacher hadn’t meant to sexually abuse
Of the nearly 54% of abusers who resigned, weren’t rehired, retired, or were terminated, superintendents reported that 16% were teaching in other schools and that they didn’t know what had happened to the other 84%. All but 1% of these teachers retained their teaching license.
However, we uncovered a number of cases in which a teacher confronted with allegations of sexual abuse of a student in one district turned up in another, without the hiring district knowing about these allegations.

(Charol Shakeshaft, Ph.D., Senate Standing Committee on Children and Families, Feb. 12, 1998)

Sexual crimes against children cause extreme victimization, both immediately and often well into adulthood. The principle reason reported for revocation of teacher certificates is sexual misconduct (Whiteby, 1992). Such crimes are commonly called “Concealed Crimes” since they often go unreported because child victims are frequently silenced by their perpetrators with either threats or intimidation.

Child sexual assault victims lose trust in adults and authority figures, suffer physical effects, and often experience extreme emotional trauma.

(School Crime, Nat’l Center for Victims of Crime, 2001)

A student should feel safe and comfortable walking down the halls of his or her school. School is a place for learning and growing. Sexual harassment stops that process.

Students, parents and school staff must be able to recognize sexual harassment, and understand what they can do to prevent it from occurring and how to stop it if it does occur.

Harassing behavior, if ignored or not reported, is likely to continue and become worse, rather than go away. As a result of sexual harassment, a student may, for example, have trouble learning, drop a class or drop out of school altogether, lose trust in school officials, become isolated, fear for personal safety, or lose self-esteem.

Under federal law, a school is required to have a policy against sex discrimination and notify employees, students, and elementary and secondary school parents of the policy.

(Sexual Harassment: It’s not academic, U.S. Dept. of Ed, 1997)

Education Week’s special report was the result of a six-month effort by Associate Editor Caroline Hendrie and Deputy Managing Editor Steven Drummond. As well as interviewing numerous state and local law enforcement officials, school staff, parents, and victims, the two investigators extensively reviewed court documents, journal articles, and other records. From file, wire, clipping, and database searches, they developed a database of 244 cases of staff-student sexual abuse that were active during the period from March and August last year.

The 244 cases range from single unexpected assaults to sexual relationships stretching over several years, from occurrences of unwanted touching to frightening incidents of serial rape—all by school employees entrusted by parents with the care of their children. The cases break down as follows:

More than 7 out of 10 suspects were teachers, with principals, janitors, bus drivers, and librarians making up most of the rest.
The average age of suspects was 28, with a range of 21 to 75.
80 percent of the suspects were men; one-third of the victims were boys.
20 percent of the suspects were woman; two-thirds of the victims were girls.
Student victims ranged from kindergartners to high school seniors, although more than two-thirds of the cases involved high school students aged 14 to 18.
No type of school was immune to abuse: public or private, religious or secular, rich or poor, urban or rural.
Abuse occurred at the school itself and in school buses, homes, motel rooms and cars.
In nearly half of the cases, suspects were accused of abusing more than one student.
2 cases were cases of false accusations; less than 1 percent of the cases studied.

Information gathered from all fifty states concerning their policies on reporting sexual abuse in schools and the legality of sexual relations between school employees and students. Among the findings:

In 20 states, it is not a crime for school employees—including teachers, administrators, and coaches—to have sex with students aged 16 and over.
In 23 states, it is not a crime for school employees to have sex with students aged 17 and over.
In 45 states, it is not a crime for school employees to have sex with students aged 18 and over.
In 16 states, it is a crime for adults in a position of trust and authority—teachers, administrators, and coaches among them—to have sex with students under the age of 18.
The Special Report cites two recent cases from Nevada where abuse-of-authority statutes were used to prosecute educators and elicit guilty pleas: a 28-year-old teacher at a Las Vegas Roman Catholic school who had sex with two female students, and a 40-year-old English teacher at a Reno public school who had sex with a 17-year-old student.

“You need a statute in every state that is very specific stating that there is zero tolerance when a student is in school,” former teacher and superintendent Chester Kent told Education Week. Kent, a scholar at the Tri-State Area School Study Council at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, emphasized that “schools should be a sanctuary where parents know their children will be safe.”

(School Reform News: Sex Between Teachers and Students (February 1999)

When the American Association of University Women Foundation surveyed more than 1,600 students in eighth through 11th grade, 25 percent of the girls and 10 percent of the boys who said they had been harassed or abused said the harasser was a school employee.

“Most states now require fingerprinting and obtaining a criminal history,” attorney Dean Pickett, a specialist in school law, told Education World. Pickett was among the speakers at this year’s annual conference of the National School Boards Association’s Council of School Attorneys. “This is vital to the screening process, but it must be done with the understanding that it will reveal only those who have encountered the criminal justice system in some way. Our studies teach us that the typical pedophile employed in our schools makes his or her way through three different school employment settings before being stopped.”

“Lying is legally fatal,” said Pickett. “The California Supreme Court’s decision in Randi W. v. Muroc Joint Unified School held a series of five school districts and their administrators liable when, time after time, they gave glowing references to a former administrator. The administrator was accused of serious improper behavior with students at each former work site and then was sued for such behavior with a student in his new place of employment.

“Saying nothing when the administrator had knowledge of prior bad acts and knowledge that the former employee is seeking employment with children is more and more likely to result in litigation,” added Pickett. “When an employee suspected of improper behavior resigns, there should be no negotiation of settlement agreements that place a gag order on telling the truth.”

(Education World, Is the Teacher in the Classroom Next Door a Convicted Felon?, Glori Chaika, 1999)

There were 103,600 reported cases of sexual misconduct in American public schools in 1998, according to the U.S. Justice Department. That’s a decrease from 149,800 in 1992, but for most parents of school-age children, it is alarming. Many of the reported cases are between students and teachers.

(Sex abuse of students common, by Elizabeth Cohen, Binghampton Press & Sun-Bulletin, Feb. 10, 2002)

Taxpayers are getting socked for the hundreds of shocking sexual attacks and other assaults committed against kids in public schools – shelling out $18.7 million to victims over the past five years, city records show.

There are 110 sex-assault cases filed since 1999 that are still pending.

(You Pay For School Assaults, Campanile and Montero, NY Post, Aug. 6, 2001)

At least one child is sexually abused by a school employee every day in New York City schools, a Post investigation has found.

More that 60 percent of employees accused of sexual abuse – mostly tenured teachers – were transferred to desk jobs at district offices located inside schools. Forty percent of those transferred suspects were repeat offenders.

Many blame the United Federation of Teachers because it vigorously defends its accused members. One union source said the UFT is legally bound to protect them – even when it knows the employee is a pedophile.

Other Post findings include:

Some 212 children were victims in the 117 cases – in 45 percent of the cases, an offender attacked more than one student. Repeat offenders made up nearly half of the suspects who attacked more than one kid.
In nearly 16 percent of the cases, school officials delayed reporting the offense or tried to cover it up.
Paraprofessionals and school aides were involved in 20 percent of the cases. Math teachers, some of whom tutored and later tried to seduce students through the Internet, made up nearly 10 percent of the offenders. Special-ed teachers also account for 10 percent.
The average victim is a 15-year-old female high-school student in Brooklyn, where 36 percent of the abuse cases occurred. The average age of an offender is 39.
Seventy-five percent of the victims are girls.
Nearly 20 percent of the offenders are homosexuals, and in most of these cases, the attack led to a sexual relationship with the student.
(Student Sex Abuse Runs Rampant, Montero, NY Post, July 30, 2001)

Sexual Abuse of school children by educators is far more prevalent than we would like to believe. During 18 years of legal practice representing school boards, at least 40 percent of the school-employee discipline cases I have worked with have involved sexual misconduct by employees toward students.

A recent study commissioned by the American Association of University Women reported that 81 percent of students surveyed in grades 8-11 said they had been sexually harassed or abused in school, 18 percent of them by school employees. In her 1991 book Educator Sexual Abuse, Idaho educator Sherry B. Bithel estimates that one in 20 teachers has engaged in sexual misconduct with students, ranging from obscene comments to sexual intercourse.

When an educator is accused of sexual abuse, the key to far and just resolution is prompt, thorough investigation.

A recent article by Florence Webb of the Association of California School Administrators has provided valuable insight into defining sexual abuse in an educational setting. Adult-to-student sexual abuse in schools has three elements: (1) any behavior by an adult (2) directed at a student (3) that is intended to sexually arouse or titillate the adult or the child. The behavior includes touching parts of the body, including breasts, genitals, or buttocks, as well as exposure of the genitals, verbal propositions, or conversations of a sexual nature.

Psychiatrist and sexual abuse expert Roland C. Summit takes a contrary position on responsibility. In an article for Child Abuse and Neglect, he argues, “[Assuming] that an adolescent can be sexually attractive, seductive, and even deliberately provocative, it should be clear that no child has equal power to say ‘no’ to a parental figure or to anticipate the consequences of sexual involvement with a caretaker. Ordinary ethics demand that the adult in such a mismatch bear sole responsibility for any clandestine sexual activity with a minor.”

When sexual overtures are made to a student by someone seen by the student as caregiver, the effects on the student are likely to be traumatic, say David Finkelhor, in A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse. The same sense of betrayal and shame that attaches to incest can be found in cases where a pseudo-parental relationship had been sexualized.

The ability to create these feelings of guilt and shame in the victim is the hallmark of an abusive adult.

State courts often award money damages in cases involving various administrators’ duties, such as:

o Failure to supervise. An administrator owes a legal duty to the students to provide adequate supervision of school employees. This includes appropriate observation, investigation, correction of improper conduct, adequate documentation, and discipline. The administrator who supervises negligently risks liability both personally and for the school district.

o Failure to investigate. Failure to investigate or a perfunctory or inadequate investigation of rumors, reports, or complaints of sexual misconduct or of suspicious conduct by a school employee may constitute negligence by an administrator.

o Failure to train. Supervisors have a duty to adopt and enforce appropriate policies and to train teachers, guidance counselors, school nurses, and administrators to respond adequately to signs, reports, and complaints of sexual misconduct to protect students.

o Failure to hire carefully.

(The Psychodynamics of School Sexual Abuse Investigations-an Attorneys Inside Look, Mary Jo McGrath, October 1994 issue of The School Administrator published by AASA.)

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