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Sexualized Culture Blamed for Teacher-Student Sex Epidemic

by Jim Brown
March 30, 2006

(AgapePress) - - An author says parents may want to consider pulling their children out of public schools once they find out young people are much more likely to be sexually abused at the hands of public school employees than by Roman Catholic priests.

Last week Florida public school teacher Debra LaFave escaped jail time despite admitting to repeatedly molesting a 14-year-old boy. WorldNetDaily magazine managing editor David Kupelian has analyzed a study commissioned by the U.S. Education Department that finds such abuse is "likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."

Kupelian, who has a 14-year-old son, says Americans -- for the most part -- do not understand how large the problem of sexual abuse in public schools really is. "This problem of teacher sexual predators in schools is just one of a thousand huge, daunting problems facing the public school system," he says.

The journalist, who has a 14-year-old son himself, says the prospect of such problems in public schooling has affected his decision as a parent. "If this happened to my son, it would destroy him. It would devastate him," the managing editor shares. "But that's why my wife and I home school our children."

But that remedy, he admits, is not for everybody. "There are other solutions besides home schooling," he says. "There are private schools, there are religious schools -- and they're all better than the public school solution."

Kupelian is convinced there are several primary factors fueling the epidemic of teacher-student sex. For one, he says, American culture is very sexualized.

"Our popular culture is swimming in it, TV and movies are filled with it, and with the Internet, more young people have seen hard-core sexual images than at any time in history," he exclaims. "That's one major factor. But there's another huge factor, which I think is even more devastating, and that is that many Americans just have no understanding of right and wrong anymore."

Kupelian, author of the book The Marketing of Evil, says the epidemic can also be traced to a lack of parental involvement in children's education.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.

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Amen brother and the media today is fueling this fire.

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Sexy media a siren call to promiscuity

Sexually charged music, magazines, TV and movies push youngsters into intercourse at an earlier age, perhaps by acting as kind of virtual peer that tells them everyone else is doing it, a study said on Monday.

"This is the first time we've shown that the more kids are exposed to sex in media the earlier they have sex," said Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina, chief author of the report.

Previous research had been limited to television, said the study which looked at 1,017 adolescents when they were aged 12 to 14 and again two years later. They were checked on their exposure during the two years to 264 items -- movies, TV shows, music and magazines -- which were analysed for their sexual content.

In general it found that the highest exposure levels led to more sexual activity, with white teens in the group 2.2 times more likely to have had intercourse at ages 14 to 16 than similar youngsters who had the least exposure.

The effect was not as pronounced for blacks, the study said, perhaps because the black youngsters in the study were already more sexually experienced than the whites were when the research began and thus were less influenced by media exposure over the two-year period.

The teenage pregnancy rate in the United States is three to 10 times higher than that found in other industrialised nations, making that and exposure to sexually transmitted infections a major public health concern, the study said.

At the same time parents tend not to talk about sex with their children in a timely and comprehensive way, leaving a vacuum in which the media may become a powerful sex educator, providing "frequent and compelling portraits of sex as fun and risk free."

"Interestingly one of the strongest predictors of risk for early gotcha146 for both black and white teens (in the study) was the perception that his or her peers were having sex," the report said.

Youngsters "may begin to believe the world view portrayed and may begin to adopt the media's social norms as their own. Some, especially those who have fewer alternative sources of sexual norms, such as parents or friends, may use the media as a kind of sexual superpeer that encourages them to be sexually active," the report added.

The study was published in the April issue of "Pediatrics," the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A portion of the data was previously published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The study was done in several schools in North Carolina. The authors said that they did not measure the impact of exposure to sexual material on the Internet because when the research began in 2001 relatively few of the early adolescents in the sample had Internet access.

Additional research should include exposure to Web-based material, the study suggested.

"It took many studies over a number of years to establish that violence in the media increased children's violent behaviour and to begin initiatives to reduce harmful effects," the study said.

"Given the consistent findings regarding media violence, it may be prudent not to wait decades to conclude that the media are also important sources of sexual norms for youth," it added.

Claymont teacher charged with having sex with 13-year-old student

By TERRI SANGINITI
The News Journal
04/04/2006

A 34-year-old teacher from the Brandywine School District has been charged with having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student.

Rachel L. Holt, a science teacher at Claymont Elementary School, allegedly had sex with the boy 28 times during one week in March, according to New Castle County police spokesman Cpl. Trinidad Navarro.

Holt, who lives in Paladin Club Apartments in Fox Point, has been charged with 21 counts of first-degree rape, two counts of providing alcohol to a minor and one count of unlawfully dealing with a minor.

She is being held in Baylor Women's Correctional Institution in lieu of $560,450 bail.

Police say the alleged incidents happened March 24 through March 31 at the woman's home and that a 12-year-old classmate observed at least one of the alleged incidents.

Navarro said police do not yet know whether the suspect, who has taught at four area schools, had sexual encounters with other students.