A 25-year-old Las Vegas teacher named Jill Lafave is charged with having sex with an 16-year-old male student in classroom at Valley High School, just east of the city’s infamous Strip. Lafave, who is currently on paid administrative leave, was an English and special education teacher at the high school. The two were reportedly seen…
Invisible Target: Breaking the Cycle of Educator Sexual Abuse. Andrea Clemens. 2015. Hickory Nut Publishing. 302 pages. [Source: Review copy from author] In the fall of 1981, Andrea Clemens entered the ninth grade and was upset to find out that one of her instructors was Robert Baker, a science teacher at Norwood Junior High School.…
A few years ago, my wife Amy was selected to serve as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching American and art history in Guangzhou, China (you can read about her experiences in her delightful book, Lessons from China.) While we were there, we had a chance to travel to different parts of the country. As a life-long…
Last month, I was invited to participate in a podcast called “A Sickness of Silence,” part of an ongoing series of roundtable discussions involving survivors of child abuse and various experts on the topic. One of the participants in the roundtable, Michael Skinner, has been kind enough to read my blog and recently sent me…
How much privacy should your child have? That’s a question that parents and children have been debating for quite some time, but with increasing intensity over the last few decades. As you might expect, parents vary widely in the amount of privacy they allow their children. (And the protestations of my younger son–at age 4(!)–notwithstanding,…
A long-time Chicago middle school teacher, who sparked an international manhunt after fleeing sexual assault charges, was sentenced on Thursday, November 5, to 50 years in prison. “You earned every day of it,” Judge Daniel Shanes told 42-year-old Michael Vucic, an 18-year veteran at Gavin South Middle School in Ingleside, IL. An arrest warrant was…
Earlier this fall, I had the pleasure of appearing on a podcast hosted by Cheri Roberts. The show, called “Challenging the Rhetoric,” is an interesting weekly show in which Roberts leads “an engaging analysis of the week’s current news and events.” Recently, Roberts has created a spin-off program called “A Sickness of Silence,” a special…
A 45-year-old science teacher at Santa Ana High School was arrested in early September “on suspicion of having sex with a 16-year-old female student” two years earlier. According to the Santa Ana Police Department, Alvar Albert Gonzalez, met the victim in one of his classes and allegedly had sex with her during her school lunch…
In August 2010, a woman named Jennifer Woolsey reportedly found a video on the desktop of her family’s shared computer that showed her husband Brian on the receiving end of a sexual act by a young woman. At the time, both she and her husband were teachers at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Arizona,…
In August, I wrote about the case of Stephanie McCrea, a drama teacher at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, WA. She used a fake Facebook page to communicate with and set up sexual trysts with a 15-year-old student. Among other things, she used the Facebook page to coach her student on how to answer questions…
