Posted by:
anybody
(
)
Date: July 08, 2020 06:07PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/he-was-abused-by-a-female-teacher-but-he-was-treated-like-the-criminal/2015/01/09/3f2e7980-96d5-11e4-aabd-d0b93ff613d5_story.htmlFor male victims of sexual abuse, this is how it goes. Growing evidence shows that boys who are sexually preyed upon by older female authority figures suffer psychologically in much the same way that girls do when victimized by older men. But in schools, courts and law offices, male victims are treated openly with a double standard, according to interviews with a dozen experts in law, psychology and social work. Some say boys should get the same protective care that girls do; other people who work with these cases argue that male teens are driven by raging hormones and are only too happy to explore their new sexuality with older women. But all of the experts agree that the discrepancy in the treatment of victims of nonviolent sexual abuse by their high school teachers is real. And it shows: Male victims typically receive lower awards in civil cases, the experts say, and female perpetrators get lighter sentences.
There is a clear hierarchy in courtrooms, lawyers say. Cases involving a male teacher and a female student result in the most severe punishments and the highest damages. Los Angeles-based lawyer David Ring, whose firm Taylor & Ring represents plaintiffs in sexual abuse suits, has worked on hundreds of teacher-student cases and says it’s not unusual for those against male teachers to end with judgments of more than $1 million. In one example, a jury awarded $5.6 million to a high school girl in a sexual abuse case involving her 40-year-old teacher. The teacher was convicted of a felony, sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay 40 percent of the civil damages to the student, who was 14 at the time of the encounters. (Chino Valley High School was ordered to pay the other 60 percent.)
But jurors and prosecutors don’t have nearly the same outrage for abusive female teachers, Ring says: “ ‘So what? Good for him.’ That’s how society looks at it.” Male students, in his experience, rarely collect damages of more than $200,000. In November, Clarkson settled his case against Cretin-Derham Hall High School for $75,000. The case against Gagne settled for just $1.
Clarkson’s attorney, Sarah Odegaard, says her team made a strategic choice: They stood to win a larger award from the school, so they agreed to a token gesture from Gagne in lieu of a trial in which she would have denied the sexual relationship. In cases like this — with “an attractive, young female” defendant — jury bias doesn’t work in favor of the victim, Odegaard says. “It’s not a bias we want to acknowledge, but we have to,” she says. “There have been some successes involving female teachers and coaches, but more often, you see lower verdicts.”
Exact comparisons between cases are difficult to make; every case is unique. Sentences and monetary damages are shaped by the number and type of sexual encounters, the age of the victim relative to the state’s age of consent, and — rightly or wrongly — the level of suffering the victim displayed during the investigation, among other factors. But while there’s no data tracking the nationwide disparity in how male and female sexual abuse victims are treated (one possible reason: male abusers tend to be significantly older than their female victims, which leads to larger penalties, according to several lawyers who work on these cases), everybody seems to agree that the disparity exists.