In the wake of the controversy surrounding Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, which prohibits public schools from teaching gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade, the national media has sought to paint conservative opposition as hysterical, anti-LGBTQ, and conspiracy-minded. The New York Times, for example, accused conservatives of having a “freakout” about imaginary “grooming” in public schools, and the Washington Post dismissed concerns about sexual abuse by teachers as a “QAnon conspiracy.”
But whatever the editorialists at the Times and the Post might say, the facts reveal that too many American public schools have been hunting grounds for sexual predators. Parents fearful about abuse in schools are not falling victim to a “moral panic” or “QAnon messaging”; they are using their intuition to assess a real danger to their children. The most comprehensive report about sexual abuse in public schools, published by the Department of Education in 2004, estimates—on the basis of a 2000 survey, conducted by the American Association of University Women, of 2,065 students in grades eight through 11—that nearly 10 percent of K-12 students have been victims of sexual misconduct by a public school employee. Assuming that figure is accurate, this would translate into an approximately 4.5 million children nationwide suffering sexual misconduct by public school employees, with an estimated 3 million suffering physical sexual abuse—a number, according to the author of the study, Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft, more than 100 times greater than the physical abuse committed by Catholic priests, who, at the time the report was published, were undergoing a reckoning for the crimes within their ranks.
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