by Arthur Weinreb
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Last week Paola Queen, a 35-year-old pregnant Toronto family studies teacher was arrested and charged with sexual exploitation. The allegations are that Queen had an affair with a student who was 16 or 17 (the police refused to give his exact age) and even lived with him for a short time. The teacher who was taken out of the classroom is due to appear in court on April 17.
Apparently both the families of Queen and her student knew about their relationship and it appears that they thought it was no big deal. There is even the suggestion that no one in the families even knew that the teacher's conduct was against the law. According to police, their investigation began after they received an anonymous tip from Crime Stoppers.
Kelly Patrick of the National Post wrote an article entitled "A textbook case of bias?" When it comes to sex between teachers and their students, gender makes all the difference." The article discusses the fact that women teachers are held to a different standard than their male counterparts are. Patrick quotes Dr. John Bradford, the associate chief of forensic psychiatry at the Royal Ottawa Health Care group as saying that teenage boys do not associate "the fulfillment of a common boyhood fantasy with abuse." The piece goes on to make the point that when the teacher is particularly good looking, giving American teachers Debra La Fave and Pamela Rogers as examples, it is even harder to see the teachers' conduct as abuse.
So far so good; but Patrick goes further. Dr. Bradford is also quoted as saying, " But many of the women have been vulnerable...they were either depressed, they had low self-esteem, and they were vulnerable, perhaps in some ways, to young males paying attention to them."
Dr. Fred Berlin, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore is also quoted in the piece as stating, "I've found that often they [the female teachers] seem to be lonely. They seem to be looking not simply for sex, but companionship and intimacy."
The poor dears. What starts off as a good article on how predatory male teachers are seen differently from female predators, rapidly descends into making excuses that attempt to mitigate if not justify, the sexual misconduct of women teachers. They're "lonely"; they have "low self-esteem". Boo hoo. Of course when male teachers are arrested on similar allegations, no one in the media runs to experts to attempt to find reasons behind the illegal trysts. The men are just seen as perverts; end of story.
A textbook case of bias? It shouldn't have even been a question.
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