Amnesty International is outraged. And rightly so. The organization is incensed about “the scale of rape by [Liberian] security forces against women and girls – some as young as 12 years old.”
However, on our shores, the U.S. Department of Justice reports more than 19,000 in-school rape victims in 1999, 58 percent higher than the 12,000 in-school rapes in 1994. Had this scale of schoolhouse rape occurred in a foreign country, against thousands of helpless children, Amnesty would surely have given the crimes full-court press.
So, why has the American press not sounded the alarm on behalf of our own children?
“Ken,” a DOJ Research Specialist responded to my query about rapes “inside school building or on school property,” saying, “According to our data … inside school building(s) or on school property … there were approximately 12,000 rapes in 1994. In 1999 … over 19,000 rapes.”
A review of DOJ’s “Personal Crimes of Violence, 1999,” Tables 61-63 revealed nearly 10 percent of all rapes that year occurring “inside school building or on school property.” Fortunately, Table 63 separates “rape” out as a violent crime.
I say fortunately since most DOJ data collapse “rape” into an overall “violent crime” category along with robbery and aggravated assault, distinctly different degrees of violent crime. Certainly, when rape is lumped in with robbery, tracking rape trends is nearly impossible.
While roughly 1 percent of elementary schools had reported rape in their schools in yet another DOJ report, despite the available age of victim data, DOJ excludes school children under age 12 from the schoolhouse rape report. Why? Other DOJ research shows that 67 percent of all sex-abuse victims are children under age 18 and 34 percent are under age 12. It would be critical to locate the number of such children victimized in our schools.
Other questions still go without answers: For instance, why are rapes not categorized by victim age and gender? What percent of school rape victims are teachers and what percent are children? Has a tribunal been convened to examine the causes of this unique child-abuse disgrace? Where are the arrest reports and the media frenzy surrounding roughly 19,000 schoolhouse rapists?
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has “8 Rules” for schoolchildren “to keep them from being victims of abuse or kidnapping.” A rough summary of the 8 Rules – training mandated for Massachusetts and Kentucky elementary children, addresses how to be safe from predators outside of school.
Children are told to ask your parents “or a trusted adult” for help if molested or alarmed by someone. If all else fails, Rule No. 8 is a self-help recitation for school children, “I am strong, smart and have the right to be safe!”
I know my readers would find these solutions to rape and sexual abuse worrisome. Who thinks that having a second grader repeat I am “strong” and “safe” would have stopped 19,000 in-school rapes of children age 12 and over?
The organization, Survivors of Educator Sexual Abuse & Misconduct Emerge, confirms the growing problem of school personnel and teachers-as-sex-perverts. SESAME cites a survey of high school graduates, finding 17.7 percent of males and 82.2 percent of females who say they were sexually harassed by faculty or staff as students, 13.5 percent saying they “engaged in sexual intercourse with a teacher.”
Given the outrageousness of these numbers, one expects ethical journalists to immediately begin in-depth investigations of these toxic schoolhouse data.
School as a sex-assault war zone follows roughly 40 years of school “sex education,” unleashed in the early 1960s when classrooms became eroticized. Rapes and sex assaults in schools – once a place of trust and safely – are now objective measures of a failed sexual worldview and of fetid social decay.
