It has been almost 20 years since it has been documented that children in our schools are in grave danger of being sexually abused by teachers.  In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft completed a U.S. Department of Education sponsored study on Educator Sexual Misconduct.  The seminal findings showed that 9.6 percent of children in our schools, public and private, are victims of educator sexual misconduct sometime between kindergarten and 12^th grade.

Almost nothing has been done about this.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS), at least, has begun to make some steps toward addressing the imminent threat to children by expanding the CPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) and greatly increasing the capability to investigate abuse allegations. They have had some success.

According to their recently released report, from late 2018 until the end of 2022 the OIG opened a little over 1,700 cases and closed almost 1, 400, leaving 300 plus cases still open. With 30 investigators on their staff, that’s not bad.

What is not so good is only 16 criminal charges wound up being filed against the accused and not all of them were convicted. It is not clear how many were convicted or what sentences they received. Moreover, we don’t even know who they were. In the CPS OIG report they are not named. Incredible.

We also don’t know how many of the accused were fired, lost their license, or merely received some kind of internal discipline. One teacher shared “images from a pornographic website while sharing his screen with students,” supposedly inadvertently. The Board gave him a “Level Three Performance Improvement Plan,” whatever that is. It’s essentially nothing. Why?

It appears that most of the accused are still working for CPS, but who knows?

Reading between the lines of the OIG report, it appears that the CPS administration and the Board have to dance delicately through the contractual minefield set up by the teachers unions to protect all teachers regardless of what they might have done. Why would there be any question about firing a teacher who shows pornography to children, whether it was on purpose or accidentally? That teacher should be gone and any union that stands behind him or her discredits itself.

Historically and even to this day, very little attention has been focused on the predators in our schools.  In 2021, Illinois State Representative Michelle Mussman (D-Schaumburg) introduced House Bill 1975, supposedly to address sexual abuse in the schools.  That bill requires educating teachers about educator sexual abuse and how to recognize the signs of “grooming.”  It is a common practice of child sexual predators to “groom,” or seduce, children over a long period of time.  Essentially, the predator will develop an increasingly intimate relationship with the child, introduce secrecy at some point, and eventually sexualize the relationship.

Mussman named the act “Faith’s Law,” after Faith Colson, a former Schaumburg High School Student who had been groomed and sexually exploited by one of her teachers starting in 2001. Based on Dr. Shakeshaft’s study we know that Faith was only one of an estimated 16,000 students in Illinois who were abused by an educator that year.

But what does this bill do to prevent what happened to Faith and 16,000 other Illinois children in 2001? Not much, if anything. The bill requires that teachers be trained to recognize grooming behavior, schools to set up policies to establish better boundaries between teachers and students, and to create a list of sexual abuse response and prevention resources to be made available to the public. The bill also expands grooming beyond electronic activity to include in person and third-party conduct.

This proposal proves that our legislators, including Mussman, simply do not take the protection of childhood innocence seriously, or are too uninformed themselves to fashion a solution.

How could anyone graduate with a childhood education degree and not know what grooming is?  There are mountains of published papers on grooming.  Everyone even remotely connected to issues of child protection knows that grooming behaviors should be viewed as a giant red flag.  Expanding the grooming law does little since you must prove intent to abuse to prosecute.  That’s almost impossible until after the abuse occurs.

Libraries already are filled with sexual abuse prevention resources, most of which nobody reads.  Just ask your librarian.  As for creating policies that establish appropriate boundaries between teacher and student?  If this hasn’t already been done in every school the people in charge should be prosecuted for malfeasance.

This law is little more than virtue signaling.

One reason the problem is so large is due the teachers’ unions.  They actively protect teachers who are predators.  Examples are everywhere of the unions shielding teachers who regularly engage in grooming behaviors.  The unions will not let them be fired.  Teachers have been known to assign obscene materials to children to read as part of a class assignment and nothing happens to the teacher. Even when caught sexually abusing children the unions often go to bat for them.

Another problem is the obscenity exemption for teachers in Illinois.  This allows librarians to provide, and teachers to recommend, highly sexualized and often deranged and perverted books for children to read or study.  Providing this kind of material to children is a typical grooming behavior of predators.  Such materials are used to begin to sexualize the relationship and to arouse the child.  It’s completely legal in Illinois schools.

Senate Bill 818, which was voted for by Mussman and 59 fellow Illinois House Democrats (all Republicans voted against it), makes the grooming problem even worse.  It mandates that all schools implement sex education programs – Kindergarten to 12^th Grade – which are to be based on the “National Sex Education Standards,” although there is a provision that allows each district to opt out of the standards if they want.

Such a farce.  These “standards” were developed by an ad hoc group of sexual progressives.  In addition to Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, Answer, and Advocates for Youth, a host of other left leaning sexual activists developed the document.

Those who created the standards believe that every person has a right to experience sexual pleasure from birth to death, that children have a right to experience sexual pleasure whenever and with whomever they want, that purity is a false value, and that children should be encouraged to experiment sexually with same and opposite sex relationships.  The standards teach that all sexual activity is good as long as there is mutual consent, disregarding that children cannot legally give consent.

Only a handful of school districts in Illinois opted into the standards. In Chicago they were using the perverse standards even before the law was passed.

The National Sex Education Standards do not call for a class in comprehensive sex ed. No. The standards require that sex ed be infused in every class, that it be part of every subject wherever possible.

These are not standards. This law destroys every remaining sexual standard established over the last two millennia. And it turns every teacher into an accomplice for every predator in our schools. It is institutionalized grooming on a mass scale and neutralizes any possible good, however little, Faith’s Law might have achieved.

Despicable.

Lawmakers and union bosses are increasingly speaking out against the violence and rampant sexual abuse that plagues children in government schools across Illinois and beyond. Laws have even been proposed and passed to supposedly deal with the escalating crisis.

However, nothing is being done to address the root causes of the problem: godlessness, hopelessness, and the lack of accountability for students and adults, all of which permeate government-controlled “education” today.

Consider the gravity of the situation. At one government school in Chicago, a dozen staff members had to be removed for what were described by the district as “inappropriate adult relationships with students,” as well as for helping cover it up.

The scandal, which included adults grooming and even having sex with children, sparked national news in November. Incredibly, while the district fired most of those involved and is seeking to pull their teaching licenses, it does not appear that prosecutors were called in due to supposed loopholes in the law.

But the sexualization and abuse of children is also nothing new. According to a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation, police investigated more than 520 juvenile sexual assault and abuse cases in the city’s government schools over a 10-year period. Hundreds of students were victimized and even raped by teachers and school employees. The stories are heart-wrenching.

In response to the horror, last month, Gov. JB Pritzker signed “Faith’s Law” (HB 1975) into law expanding the definition of “grooming” and adding protections for children against predators in schools. The measure was named after Faith Colson, who was sexually abused by a teacher 20 years ago in Schaumburg, Illinois.

“Students deserve to be safe in their classrooms, period,” declared the far-left governor, who has been a major advocate of sexualizing children in schools. “Anything short of that is a call to action and Faith’s Law is another critical step in creating and preserving safe and welcoming learning environments for all students.”

But of course, with Pritzker’s full support, government schools in Illinois are literally grooming and sexualizing students right now in the same way pedophiles do, as former teacher and celebrated activist Rebecca Friedrichs explained in a piece for the Washington Times.

From exposing children to graphic sex materials and perversion to breaking down taboos and modesty under the guise of “comprehensive sex education,” children across the state and beyond are being put in great danger by the hyper-sexualized so-called “education” being foisted on them by government “educators.”

Even two decades ago, the U.S. Department of Education reported that as many as 10 percent of children in government schools would be sexually abused by employees of the system before graduation.

“The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by [Catholic] priests,” Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft, who researched the issue, was quoted as saying by CBS about the problem.

Violence in Illinois government schools is out of control, too. It got so bad that in 2019, the legislature felt compelled to pass a law known as the School Threat Assessment Bill (HB 1561). The measure required schools to develop threat assessment teams, protocols, and more.

But it obviously has not worked, with lawmakers and union leaders demanding more action to enforce compliance and protect students from violence. State Representatives Fred Crespo (D-Streamwood) and Tony McCombie (R-Sterling) are now co-sponsoring legislation to beef up the 2019 law.

“We hear every day more stories, unfortunately, about incidences in our schools and we need to keep our kids safe, we need to keep our teachers safe, and hopefully this will be a pro-active movement that we can do just that,” said Rep. McCombie about the bill.

Illinois Education Association (IEA) President Kathi Griffin, who is backing the legislative action, spoke out as well.  “Violence is increasing in our schools across the state,” she said in a statement last month. “Our educators should not have to constantly worry about their safety and the safety of their students.”

“This is not their problem to solve. They’re under enough stress already,” continued Griffin in her remarks urging school districts to obey school safety laws. “School administrators need to take immediate action to keep our students, staff and communities safe.”

Meanwhile, as shown by government data highlighted by the Illinois Family Institute, government schools are destroying children academically, too. Less than a third of 8^th-grade students are proficient in any core subject, the latest National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) revealed.

In short, countless children in government schools are being sexually abused and brutalized by adults and fellow students — even as they suffer academically — while government passes meaningless laws pretending to address the symptoms of the horrific problem.

Of course, the real reason that children in government schools are facing more and more violence, dumbing down and sexual exploitation by adults is that the environment is corrupt to the core — by design. It is the fruit of removing God and biblical morality from education as part of an evil agenda.

Once one understands that the goals of the architects of the government system were never to provide a sound education, true solutions such as an exodus from public schools and defunding the corrupt system can grow. That is already starting to happen, but much more urgency is needed.

Read more:

Educators Called Out For ‘Ideological Grooming’ of Student (AFR)