Exclusive: Teacher Sexual Misconduct Is ‘Rampant’ in U.S. Schools, Leading Experts Find

It’s like a pandemic: Weekly news reports of yet another teacher arrested for having an erotic relationship with a student – often a young, attractive female exploiting a teen male under the age of consent. But this phenomenon of “educator sexual misconduct,” or ESM, is not as bad as it appears.

In fact, it’s worse. Such stories evoke the prurient pop music theme found in the rock band Van Halen’s 1984 tune “Hot For Teacher.”

However, in the real world, the overwhelming majority of these criminal relationships are never disclosed and prosecuted, and their destructive impact on victims goes largely unreported. It was “traumatic,” said Grant Strickland, a Greenville, North Carolina teen, one of the few boys to speak out years after a 33-year-old teacher Nicole Callaham allegedly groomed him in 2021 at age 14 with alcohol and marijuana into a two-year sexual relationship.

“I would never want someone to go through with what I went through,” he told reporters following a court hearing of his alleged abuser.

“Because I don’t think most people would be showing up to survive it. Because I almost didn’t.” In fact, exclusive interviews with leading researchers and forensic psychologists on the subject and an investigation by Breitbart News into the data reveals into that such sexual abuse is both underreported and understudied — despite being what one researcher called “a serious public health concern.”

The causes range from teacher shortages to undetected personality disorders in educators to what clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has called the collapse of Western values and the embrace of “subjective morality,” inflamed by an online world where anything goes. As for the numbers and trends, the Department of Education (DOE) study of 50 million students in nearly all of the 100,000 schools in the U.S., updated in 2022, showed a nearly 100 percent increase in educator rape or attempted rape since an earlier study published in 2004. That statistic actually underestimates problem because only six percent of student victims disclose what they experience, a previous DOE study revealed.

“It’s definitely underreported,” leading researcher Charol Shakeshaft recently told Breitbart News. Shakeshaft has been studying the problem for four decades and is considered the nation’s leading expert on the issue, having authored the 2004 landmark study for the DOE under the Bush administration. It was Shakeshaft who formulated the six percent rate.

“It’s under underreported because a kid feels ashamed, like it was their fault,” the Virginia Commonwealth University department chair and professor emeritus explained.

“It’s very common for [the perpetrator] to make the kid believe ‘if you wouldn’t be so sexy, if you wouldn’t always be acting this way, I wouldn’t be doing this.’ These are adults who have good shaming and good grooming language.” Even with the under reporting, the spate of recent cases grabbing national headlines in the past six months defy being limited to any community or particular demographic.

A partial sampling of these stories covered by Breitbart News in the past six months include: A Southern California woman, 36, goes from “teacher of the year” to a 30-years-to-life prison term for sexually abusing two of her sixth-grade students. A 37-year-old female teacher in the Jersey Shore is sentenced to prison for grooming two students and then having sex with them in various locations, including her family’s bagel shop. A 30-year-old substitute teacher Missouri receives a decade in prison for essentially turning her rural middle school students into male prostitutes, paying them for sex and rewarding them with drugs and alcohol.

In Wisconsin, two female teachers, both 25, face charges, one for allegedly having sex with a 13-year-old boy while her colleague is accused of sexual assault on a 15-year-old. The 28-year-old the daughter of the mayor of a tiny Oklahoma town of hardly 700 people — the young woman also the wife of the town’s police chief — is sentenced to prison for soliciting sex from a 15-year-old student. A male teacher, 39, at an elite Brooklyn school prepping students for the Ivy League is serving time for engaging 13 to 15-year-old students in sexual conversations and obtaining from them nude photos and videos.

Shakeshaft was sounding the alarm 20 years ago. But the mainstream news media largely ignored her stunning findings and focused on condemning the Catholic Church.

“Think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft told the National Review in 2006.

“The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” While it’s the female teachers who make the headlines, that coverage is deceiving, according to Shakeshaft’s study and other research done by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. While academic teachers commit 63 percent of the abuse, followed by coaches and gym teachers at 20 percent, 85 percent of offenders were male.

Nearly three quarters of victims were female. Shakeshaft believes women grab the headlines because tabloid-style news outlets focus on the salacious value like that in the Van Halen video for clicks and readership. One New York tabloid recently used a young married teacher’s move to another state as an excuse to dredge up the teacher’s 2022 Washington case and report in nearly pornographic detail the “depraved, hours long sex marathon” she had with a 17-year-old.

“It feels like voyeurism,” Shakeshaft said of much of the reporting.

“It’s not like they’re reporting a crime.”

She continued, “And we minimize the danger — the harm and danger to boys — because we make it seem as if there’s some kind of conquest. Like this is just some kind of gift to boys.” Grant Strickland, the boy who courageously spoke out in North Carolina, met his abuser at a theatrical audition, winning a part in a school play the teacher was directing.

The grooming allegedly began with her picking him up for rehearsals.

“I had to grow up very, very fast and get onto a whole other maturity level I was never ready for and shouldn’t have had to been,” Strickland said.

“Just because I’m a man doesn’t mean it should be shunned away,” he also said.

“’Cause I was a child. I wasn’t a man. I was a boy.”

John Jay College psychologist Elizabeth L. Jeglic, the United States’ other leading expert on the topic, agrees that little attention has been paid to both the short-term and long-term impact on boys. The psychologist and her team have updated what she called “rampant” sexual misconduct numbers for this decade, focused on the psychopathology and grooming behaviors of the educators and, like Shakeshaft, also proposed ways to detect and stop offenders. Jeglic found that more than one in ten students underwent “at least one form of educator sexual misconduct” during their school years.

That’s some 500,000 U.S. students in any given year. When it comes to teacher-student sexual activity secondary schools, Jeglic theorized that incidents may have increased because of teacher shortages in the COVID era and the hiring of young teachers in their early 20s to teach middle and high school students.

“We’re seeing a lot of young teachers where there’s not a huge age difference between the teacher and the student,” she told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.