Teachers Using Tech to Cross the Line

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, “Teachers Using Tech to Cross the Line,” I speak with Kotomi Yokokura, researcher and graduate student at Washington University. Now we’ve all seen media reports of educator sexual misconduct, the over interested band director, the exploitive teacher, but what do we really know about how this misconduct starts and the ways in which instant messages, DMs, Facebook messenger, Snapchat, or anything else really contribute to it?

Parents know to be vigilant about one-on-one contact between adults and kids when it’s in person. But do they have the information they need to be equally vigilant about private online communication between teachers and their children? And how do we set boundaries around what kinds of online or electronic communications are okay, and what crosses the line?

As you will hear, consistent prevention guidelines around one-on-one communication between teachers and students are essential to protecting kids both in and out of the school setting. I know you’ll find this conversation as helpful as I did. Please take a listen.

Hi, Kotomi. Welcome to One in Ten.

 

Kotomi Yokokura: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to speak with you today.

 

TH: Well, let’s start by talking about how did you come to this work, deciding to research educator sexual misconduct, and especially the element that we’re gonna talk more about, which is about their electronic communications and use of that as a part of the grooming and abuse process.

 

KY: Yeah, so I actually came to the field of educator sexual misconduct because I have lived experience with educator sexual misconduct. After my experience, I began to get involved in  legislative advocacy in Kentucky and in collaboration with the local organizations, Kentucky Youth Advocates. I started looking at news stories, because I knew my story, but I didn’t really know other people’s stories and I’m just one student in Kentucky.

And through that I saw this theme of electronic communication over and over. So things like text messages, social media, phone calls, and then I was really interested if that same theme was represented in academic literature. And that’s where I was surprised that there wasn’t as much discussion around electronic communication use in cases of educator sexual misconduct in the academic side.

So that’s really where the study came about, was if we look at other sources of data, so in this study it was disciplinary action records. Do we see the similar theme of use of electronic communication to carry out educator sexual misconduct?

 

TH: So let’s just kind of level set for our listeners a little bit about what we know about educator sexual misconduct.

Because I think all listeners are professionals in child abuse, and we’ve all had these cases that involve teachers, so no surprise there. But I think that what often happens is that people think about like, the one school I was aware of, the one case I was aware of, not necessarily what its prevalence is.

So talk a little bit about, you know, as you did in your literature review, what do we know in general about how common this is?

 

KY: Yeah, so educator sexual misconduct, again, just for that level setting. I just wanna define it really quickly ’cause it’s a little different from like our criminal definition of child sexual abuse.

So educator sexual misconduct is looking at any sexual behavior from an educator towards their K through 12 student. So if it’s a current K through 12 student, any age, even if they’re over 18 or currently 18, if it’s a former student under 18. And our prevalence of educator sexual misconduct, so one that’s cited a lot is Shakeshaft’s study in 2004, which was commissioned by the Department of Education and that found that around 9.6% of students experience educator sexual misconduct sometime in their K through 12 educational career.

So that’s almost 1 in 10 students. And when we’re looking at characteristics of educator sexual misconduct, we see largest proportions, male academic educators, and then those who have like those one-on-one relationships.

TH: I think a lot of folks would be a little surprised that it’s as common as 1 in 10, you know, because they may remember that one case.

But if we’re talking about 1 in 10, that’s a lot of behavior that really steps outside the line. And I also saw that you quoted a more recent study by Elizabeth Jeglic as well, which concerningly looks like this behavior may be increasing.

 

KY: Yeah. So in Dr. Jeglic’s study, along with colleagues in 2023, they found that it was around 12%, which is close to 10%, but it is larger than what they found in that secondary analysis in 2004.

 

TH: And so, if I’m remembering right, and I think this ties to our discussion today, part of the reason that folks believe that this may be an actual increase in not just an artifact in the study or something like that, has to do with the contribution of the ubiquity of smartphones held by students, and the fact that, well, now you’ve documented that it’s a fact that in fact educators are using this as a mechanism to groom kids or conduct misconduct.

 

KY: Yeah. So in this study we found that a majority of educators who were disciplined for educator sexual misconduct did use some type of electronic communication or technology to carry out educator sexual misconduct.

 

TH: Back up just for a minute, because I did think it was very interesting the population you decided to look at where you got your data.

So can you just talk a little bit about why did you look at this particular pool and what it consisted of?

 

KY: So this data set looked at disciplined educators, so educators who are disciplined by the Education Professional Standards Board. In Kentucky, the Education Professional Standards Board, which is a really long name.

So it’s just EPSB. They’re the licensing agency for educators, so certified educators. They can give you the license, take it away voluntarily, surrender it, suspend your license. So I went through them to find five years of disciplined educators. So it’s a little bit different from like media reports, which I looked at earlier, because media reports can be sensationalized a little bit of what are the big ones that we’re seeing.

It can also not be substantiated. So there could be cases of educator sexual misconduct allegations instead of actual cases versus these records that I did analyze are all substantiated through an investigation conducted by EPSB. So they have their own legal team that goes through and looks at these cases, reports, student records, to see if this qualifies as educators sexual misconduct to the degree that warrants disciplinary action on an educator’s license.

 

TH: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think some of the qualifiers you’re adding, there was some attention drawn to that in the paper about the seriousness of this, that in order to be included in your study, there had to be a contemplation that someone’s certification could be revoked or withheld, suspended essentially for a number of years, correct?

 

KY: Yes.

 

TH: And so the other thing, and I appreciated this as well about the sort of data pool you looked at, because there was an investigation conducted, you really had a breadth and records. I mean, I read through that paragraph about, it was a long paragraph about all the kinds of things that could be included in those records.

And really it would be very analogous, although not identical to the types of things you would see in a criminal case, even though these might not be criminal cases. The sort of level of investigation felt to me to be very similar in terms of looking at, you know, everything from records held by the student or educator, or even other kinds of things like affidavits of testimony and others, things like that. Correct?

 

KY: Yeah. So it wasn’t just the plain fact of was there or was there not educator sexual misconduct in this case? We sometimes even had text messages if they used electronic communication. Some records had all the text messages that I could flip through. There was one record that was over a thousand pages.

Because there were just text messages back and forth between students and teachers, and then there’s also a testimony by educators they can file a rebuttal. So their side of this case is also provided in all those records.

 

TH: Oh, interesting. That must make for some very interesting reading in of itself. So in the lit review of the paper before we got to your study, one of the things that it talked about is like sort of who’s most likely to be involved in educator sexual misconduct?

And as you touched on earlier, it’s male teachers, right?

 

KY: Yes.

 

TH: Not exclusively. But two thirds or something like that. What else? What are other characteristics and how did this align with what you found as well? So I’m interested in sort of hearing like what have we historically known about this and how did that align or not aligned when you add the sort of electronic communications component?

 

KY: Yeah, so as you said, male educators are often one of the largest proportions we see academic educators, so people who are physically teaching even more than coaches or administration, bus drivers. Those staff, and then individuals with a lot more one-on-one communication.

So communication with students that they can really build that relationship and have access to a student. When I looked at just general educator sexual misconduct, my findings fairly aligned, so it was largely male. I didn’t really look at the academic versus coaches because again, my records are for certified staff, so like bus drivers, they don’t have an education teaching license, so they aren’t included in this study.

It’s just the teachers. And then one-on-one, you can’t really gauge as well through disciplinary action records because it gives you their grade level, but not exactly what they’re teaching or their outside curricular activities. But when we’re looking at electronic communication, again, largely male, but there is an equal proportion of electronic communication use just in a majority of educators who are disciplined use electronic communication use, whether that’s people who have been certified for one year all the way up to like over 30 years, everyone’s using electronic communication and there’s not really that big difference. Like we saw more males, less females, a majority of both males and a majority of both females are using electronic communication use.

 

TH: I mean, I think this just speaks to the ubiquity of this as being the way we communicate these days. Right? And people aren’t picking up the phone, they’re texting each other and that gets caught up in misconduct cases just in the same way it would anything else. I was interested that in the review of the literature, it also picked up on the fact that many of the individuals who are engaging in misconduct are early career teachers, and I can’t remember now, so you’ll have to remind me what your study found about that. Did you find that was the same, and what do you make of that? Do you think it’s just, it just picked up on that because if they engaged in a long period of time, they were more likely to be bounced out of the profession, or is it inexperience and something else, or, I’m just.

I was a little bit flummoxed by that. What do you think that is about?

 

KY: Yeah, so my study also saw something similar where the most often disciplined educators had been certified under 10 years. So they likely were in the teaching field for 10 years or less. Like you’re saying, these newer educators, and I couldn’t give you a really good answer on why this is, there’s a couple of theories out there.

There could be this “professional perpetrator” who may be entering a field for specific access to children, and this has been studied as well, and some studies have found that this is a driving factor. One study looked at males and youth serving organizations, and they saw that the males reported that access to children was one of the reasons that they chose the profession that they went into.

But there are also some other studies. One study looked at females and they didn’t find that this was a driving factor. So it could be or it could not. That’s a great area for further research, further qualitative discussions with educators if this is going into their decision, because it really does impact policies around how we’re hiring educators.

Another one, like you said, it could be that, they’re young, and if they are carrying out educator sexual misconduct early on in their career, they’re not making it to later on in their career. And so that’s why there could be less people who are disciplined later in their career. It could also be that the education, so there’s, in Kentucky, there’s three ranks.

Rank three, all the way to rank one. Rank three is basically your intro level. When you have a bachelor’s, you go into the education field as a rank three. Then if you get a graduate degree or you get further training, you can move up to rank two, rank one. And we’re seeing most disciplined educators were rank three for those who use electronic communication and rank two for just general educator sexual misconduct.

But that’s a little skewed because there’s just more rank two educators in Kentucky. So we don’t really look at rank two, like it’s proportional. But that could also be maybe our training is working so that as you get more education, it could be that you’re getting disciplined less. But there wasn’t really a statistical significance of that.

 

TH: Now, I wanna turn to the kids for a moment because, you know, I think we all know that kids have phones. And that it’s just nearly ubiquitous, and you cited a 2021 study, so right really during the pandemic, but that 43% of kids, aged 8 to 12 had smart phones and 88% of 13 to 18 year olds. I mean, now I think for that older group, it might be 90 something percent.

I don’t know. It feels like they’re just everywhere. But I think that. When parents have thought about the risk of misconduct between a teacher and their child, it has always felt somewhat remote because it’s like, well, if they called the house or whatever, obviously I’m gonna know that they called or whatever.

I think that parents, especially now, really have not caught up with the fact that everybody has a cell phone. There aren’t landlines. Like mentally caught up. I don’t mean in terms of their practice, but just like mentally the way that has changed risk for contact between educators and their kids that they would have no knowledge of.

Because I think parents often pride themselves on like, of course I would know if somebody was texting my child incessantly, but the case that you described of having, I don’t know, thousand. Was it pages or messages?

 

KY: Pages.

 

TH: Pages. Which is even more terrifying.

 

KY: It was the whole record.

 

TH: Right, of messages between an educator and a student.

I mean, that is a volume that a parent would be, you know, I think would be very shocking to parents to think that much contact could happen and they would have a complete lack of awareness about that.

 

KY: Yeah. So to touch on the parent awareness too, I do wanna make a call out that. Parents could be looking at phones, but educators I saw in this study were also making comments about, “remember to delete messages.”

There was a lot of electronic communication that was cloaked in secrecy, so I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Snapchat is an app that’s often used. With Snapchat you can delete messages or they instantly delete. You set a time and after the recipient opens it, however long you set, it automatically deletes.

Or there were cases where educators had students create private fake social media accounts so that they could communicate not through their personal like, public social media account, but a fake social media account so that there could be a little more secrecy around electronic communication use. So yes, parents could be proactively monitoring it, but I do wanna just make a note that there is some secrecy and some efforts to keep communication a secret through electronic communication.

 

TH: Yes. I was so glad that you pointed this out because for one thing, I thought it was kind of a surprising percentage that use social media as the mechanism. I don’t know, it was like 50% of the educators that were engaged in sexual misconduct, had used social media as a way of conducting that. But you gave an example, and I have to say I’ve seen a lot of cases, but I was like, oh, that’s interesting.

Where they’d encouraged a kiddo to set up a fake Twitter account, right? So they could communicate with them using Twitter.

 

KY: Yeah, it was private Twitter messages.

 

TH: I think most parents would not think that one up. You know, it’s just, it. It’s like a bridge so far, you know, in terms of the level of sneakiness that the educator has and just how it’s all a betrayal of trust.

But I mean, that’s such a clear exposure of the intent. To conduct the misconduct and to harm the child or youth as a part of it when you’re encouraging them to set up false accounts and things like that, just, it’s awful. So I’m just wondering though, let’s kind of talk for a minute about where in school are these folks, like the ones who are conducting misconduct, are they primarily high school teachers, middle school teachers, elementary school teachers? Who are these people?

 

KY: Yeah, so they’re actually a range of all of those. We have elementary school, middle school, and high school teachers who are carrying out educator sexual misconduct in Kentucky. Now, when we’re looking at electronic communication use and educator sexual misconduct, the highest prevalence is high school. And for electronic communication use, again, maybe that is because, as you cited earlier, more high schoolers have personal devices, but high school educators were more often using electronic communication as well.

 

TH: You know, I was surprised not by that, but by the percentage that involved middle school students. Because I think we think about high school students, as you know, youth are already at least somewhat aware of like they’ve gone through online, stranger danger training, you know, some of these kinds of things, but middle school students are just, you know, it just made me wonder, are we doing enough to, I mean, we need to do more with high school students too, because I think often, unfortunately, those kids wind up in a scenario in which they think it’s like a friendship being exploited.

Do you know what I mean? They think of the teacher as a friend, and then the teacher exploits that friendship. I think with middle school students, it’s a different thing altogether, which is really, it strikes me as much more the classic kind of grooming situation that’s often going on there. But I just wonder if our prevention education has really caught up with this, you know?

What are your thoughts about that?

 

KY: That’s really interesting too. ’cause you talked about stranger danger type of discussion and I think that’s a lot of what we talk about when we’re talking about online sexual exploitation, online child abuse, child sexual abuse, and I think something that is really interesting and could be important for our future policies, trainings, or prevention efforts, is shifting this stranger danger narrative as well. So Finkelhor Company in 2022 did a study around online child sexual abuse, and they found that online grooming by an adult and online child sexual abuse most often were carried out by individuals that children knew offline.

So these were people that they met in person, and that’s really where educators fall because educators have in-person relationships with these students prior to pursuing educators, sexual misconduct, any sexual exploitation, sexual behaviors. And so they really fall in this new children before in person, and that’s really where we may need to shift this narrative of stranger danger or expand upon stranger danger to include, Hey, we also need to be talking about appropriate boundaries, appropriate communications with people you do know in person.

 

TH: It is such a fine line because we absolutely need to make sure that kids at all ages are educated about how to recognize boundary violating behaviors and understand what are and aren’t appropriate boundaries and all of those things, because that’s just sort of basic safety information that we need them to know.

On the other hand, it’s so irritating to have to do all of that because adults won’t behave themselves appropriately around children. And so I wonder what this study and its findings lead you to believe about what we need to be saying to adults about this topic.

 

KY: Yeah, there needs to be more training, more clear policies around what is considered appropriate electronic communication use, but appropriate student teacher boundaries in general for teachers as well.

And then even working with parents, because we talked about earlier, parents might be considering electronic communication use is something they don’t have to think about when thinking about child sexual abuse, especially with their educator or in school settings. So even talking with parents and doing trainings with parents around the prevalence of educator sexual misconduct, using electronic communication and boundaries that they can talk to their kids about, but then also keep an eye on for the educator side of things so we can incorporate all adults in children’s lives.

 

TH: So I’m gonna ask you to speculate for a moment, okay. Because this wasn’t in your study. But one of the things I have wondered about with sort of coming outta the pandemic, but during the pandemic there was so much, you know, virtual school at home. And I think as a part of that, there was a lot of informal ways of dealing with giving homework assignments and all of these other things.

So. I’m from the dark ages. I’m 53. So when I was growing up, if a teacher had called my house, this would’ve been like 911 emergency. Huge news, right? Nobody’s calling to say, Johnny missed their homework assignment, or Teresa didn’t turn into her paper. Or by the way, there’s a new assignment on board.

Like that just didn’t happen for my generation. So I think that for people who are maybe not 53, but you know about the age to have children who are still in school, I think there’s this really. Maybe not sufficient sort of mindset shift about what’s actually occurring. And that seems to me that it got a little bit catalyzed during the pandemic when there was a lot of this checking in and whatever that was done often through text messages, group chats, group texts, all of this.

And schools didn’t have a lot of clear boundaries about that because it was sort of just like go and do, hope for the best. And so I wonder if, because it sort of seems to me like post pandemic, everybody’s like, oh, pandemic’s over. We’re so delighted. And not really paying much attention to maybe the fact that there are some boundaries that got pushed a little bit and maybe even for very good reason at the time.

But if we don’t reinstall the guardrails, you know, we’re gonna have problems. And I just wondered how you think about how we should talk to superintendents, to principals, to school board members, to people who actually do set policy, who have the ability to say, here is the code of conduct for teachers around this issue.

How should we be talking to them about this?

 

KY: Yeah, so again, as you quote out speculative, because it isn’t from my study, but I’m actually gonna be talking about this from the frame of like the advocacy work I do because it’s really interesting, it kind of aligns. So something I hear a lot as well is even pre COVID, it’s coaches or academic teachers who were coaches or are coaches talking about how they need to reach students if practice is canceled, or, Hey, we need to move inside because it’s raining.

Important information to get to students in a very timely manner. And states such as Kentucky just passed this as well, are trying to shift this of we can talk and communicate with students, but through pre-approved manners. So it could be, when I was growing up, there was Remind, I think there are other things that are out there now, but school district approved methods of communication. And then also if we want to incorporate parents or trusted adults, having them provide written consent if they’re approving an educator, to communicate with the student outside of these approved manners that the school district can keep track of. But then also they can add stipulations of, yes, you can text my student, but I will need to be on all the group message texts.

And so the parent can also be receiving these texts as well, so that there is a little more, as you said, guardrails around how communication is occurring. So communication can occur because even after COVID, we’re moving into way more technology use in educational spaces, and that’s not bad. We use Google Classroom, Classroom Dojo, all of these great educational tools that we can take advantage of in educational spaces, put guard rails around it. How are we using it and how are we making sure people understand that this is the only way you should be using it within school hours or within a normal work hour. So we aren’t getting text messages late at night to students.

 

TH: You know, as you were talking, I was thinking the other thing that this will require is not just asking parents things because parents trust teachers, just bottom line. They do. And if you ask somebody to sign a paper that says, you can text my child yourself if blah, blah, blah happens, they’re gonna say yes. ’cause they’re like, I trust teachers. And that’s not good. So I think there’s an issue around informed consent.

 

KY: Hmm.

 

TH: Like if we’re going to say that it’s acceptable for a teacher to individually text a student, which by the way, I personally would say ixnay on that without having that within a system where that’s being recorded and the teacher knows it’s recorded. Right? Or the parent is also being texted at the same time, so they see it in real time. I just think that has other problems if it doesn’t have that. But I think if you are going to allow any of that for any reason, there has to be informed consent where you’re saying to the parent, here are the possible risks of allowing this.

I’ve never seen that one time because I feel like there’s a lot of… Can I say on my podcast, CYA? There is a lot of that in the school system where it’s like, well, but the parent gave consent. Okay. Yes, but that is about your liability issue. That’s not about what the issue really is about, which is making the kids safer and the fact that the parent consented to it.

Did you ever say to the parent it could be that an educator would use that one-on-one contact with your child to conduct an inappropriate conversation, which might include sexual content? I mean, no parent would sign that. They’d be like, absolutely not. But there’s this piece around consent, but then there’s the piece around informed consent, and that I guess personally is somebody who spent an adult lifetime doing this work, is what I would like to see around this.

 

KY: Yeah. That’s amazing. I completely agree too, and I think that’s a great place to put it with parent training on educators, sexual misconduct, and the abuse of electronic communication as part of the informed consent of this is what electronic communication can is and has been used for in educational settings.

 

TH: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing, and again, this wasn’t a part of your study, but we’re just having to chat here, so I’m gonna talk about it anyway, but recently we had a guest on the podcast and we talked about a study, also a great one, which looked at different forms of institutional abuse. So not just non-criminal misconduct, but actually child sexual abuse.

And it looked at the big six. Youth serving organizations. You probably saw this study even. And it also looked at religious settings and it looked at schools and it looked over a trend line like, I can’t remember how many decades, but several decades. So it was looking at. Did prevalence change over time?

And what was so interesting in that maybe 20 years, but I’m not speaking to that, people go back and listen to the actual podcast if you want more information about that one. But at any rate, what it found is because all the big six youth serving organizations have been embroiled in doing child sexual abuse prevention activity for the last number of years because of lawsuits, because of the scandals, because of everything.

The conclusion of that study is that all that they’ve done has actually improved the situation for kids. It has actually made it safer. The reported caseload has gone down. This is good, so it needs to continue to go down. But the basic finding was prevention efforts actually work in matter and codes of conduct in particular.

So that was the key finding of the study. Interestingly enough, educational settings, there was no change over that same period and they think. And this was kinda the point of the study, and I think it would be an interesting area to explore, is the difference that having the lack of code of conduct, like educational settings do not have to the same degree clear codes of conduct for teachers that say, here’s the amount of in-person contact that you can have, whether or not you can touch a student, for example, whether or not you can communicate with them after school.

All those things that. Like if you were talking about Boy Scouts or Big Brothers, Big Sisters, they now have very clear guidelines. And so these guidelines have been helpful in helping people, not only kids know when something is off and not only putting on notice the actual employees, but also it’s a way for parents to talk about it like, oh, I’m aware of the code of conduct. What I’m hearing my kid describe to me is violating that code of conduct. I need to talk to somebody about that. So I’m just curious about your reaction to this sort of situation in which it does seem much, I don’t know about Kentucky. Maybe you do, but it seems much more nebulous in terms of firm rules around codes of conduct for educators and whether or not that might be a helpful tool because as you say, technology’s gonna continue to advance and there’s gonna be more ways to communicate with kids every day. So what are your thoughts about that?

 

KY: Yeah, I think you’re completely right. In school settings, there really isn’t firm policies around what’s appropriate, what’s not. They’re very vague and up to interpretation, and that can be a harmful aspect because how are people going to call out, Hey, I think you’re crossing a boundary if the boundary line is different for everybody because it’s unclear where it’s actually standing.

And I think even we are talking about students being aware of, oh, I think this action may be crossing the boundary or parents saying this may be crossing a boundary, but also other educators in school settings, if they’re looking at their peers actions, are they able to place, oh, this is crossing a boundary without proper and clear policies?

I think that’s a lot of gray area because in my study, there was primarily all the reports were coming or a majority of the reports were coming through the school superintendent, so it was reported through the school system. Rarely was it self-reported, if ever, or concerned family concerned community members.

 

TH: That’s interesting. That’s fascinating.

 

KY: Yeah, so the educators being aware of where, when other educators or even principals, school superintendents, being aware where this boundary is, can be really important in the identification of educator sexual misconduct.

 

TH: The other thing that, as you were talking, I was thinking about is, you know, one of the things that we know from the literature is that at a certain age, kids are more likely to tell each other than anybody else if something inappropriate has happened.

Right? Their peers are just developmentally, that’s the, those are the most important people in their lives for a period of time. And so the other thing about a lack of clear rules that everyone knows. So parents know the rules, and they’re the same rules known by the educators, which are the same as known by all the kids, is you don’t have that situation where a kid hears something and goes, oh, that’s you know, that’s off the chain. I’ve gotta go talk to somebody. It’s not uncommon for a child to report that to another child and the child to tell a parent or a teacher immediately. ’cause they’re like, that is way out there, what I just heard from my friend, and I wanna protect them. But you don’t have that kind of safety net here at all, because if everybody doesn’t have knowledge of all the same rules then one kid reporting to another that, you know, I got a text from my teacher, whatever. That wouldn’t necessarily set off any alarm bells, you know?

 

KY: Exactly. Especially if other teachers are normally texting students.

 

TH: Oh my God, you know what? This is so annoying me with some teachers, right?

And teachers do the Lord’s work. Like so they’re amazing. I had the best teachers, but it’s like for people to go into this field and then abuse that trust is the thing that’s really, really hard because we know how damaging that is for kids. And even if it doesn’t cross the line all the way over into criminal child sexual abuse, there’s still a very deep violation of trust that kids feel when these things happen. So I’m wondering what’s next for you research wise. We were so glad we happened onto this paper and I know that you have a long career ahead of you. So what’s peaking your interest these days?

 

KY: Yes, so I’m definitely gonna be continuing to work in the child sexual abuse space.

My other area of interest is housing and homelessness, so my goal is to end up bridging the two, looking at child sexual abuse as a pathway into homelessness for youth, but also the cycle of sexual violence among unhoused youth, and just this interplay between the two.

 

TH: Well come back on the show when you finish that work and publish again, because I think these areas are really critically important and I appreciate that you’re looking in areas that have not always had a lot of attention.

So is there anything else that you were hoping we would talk about today or any question that I should have asked you and didn’t?

 

KY: Oh, I think there’s honestly just three main points of this research and the first one’s just, there really isn’t this like single image of educator sexual misconduct.

Wouldn’t that be great if we could just give everyone a checklist and the policies and trainings? You just have to look for three things, but there really isn’t any image in this study, male, female, all high school, middle school, elementary school, rank certifications, student teachers, people who’ve been teaching up to 35 years.

So GAO, the Government Accountability Office in 2014 did a study where one of the main barriers in reporting for educators was this disbelief around whether or not their peer could be carrying out educator sexual misconduct, whether that disbelief was due to reputation or the educator not fitting this one image of educator sexual misconduct.

So one of the big things really is calling out that there is no image of educator sexual misconduct. The second one, as we mentioned, is just the need for shifting or including in-person understanding that it’s not just stranger danger, but online child sexual abuse, use of electronic communication can also include those who you know or children know offline.

And the last one. The need for clear policies and trainings, and again, teachers are amazing. All of my mentors are previous educators that I’ve met sometime in my educational career and I’m, we’re not trying to overburden teachers. I think it’s really how do we collaborate with teachers to set these appropriate boundaries, appropriate uses of electronic communication to work with them to keep the students they care about safe.

So I think it’s really this collaboration with teachers to keep students safe.

 

TH: Well, I 100% agree with you, and I think that, you know, for all the wonderful teachers out there, nothing disturbs ’em more than seeing an abuse of trust by one of their peers. So I appreciate all your work in this area and come back to talk about your future work anytime.

Thank you so much.

 

KY: Thank you so much.

 

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague and to see the full episode, please visit our YouTube channel NCA4CACs. For more information about this or any of our other episodes, please visit our podcast website at OneinTenpodcast.org.