Educators confront hidden horror of sex assault
17,000 attacks were reported in 4 years
BRUNSWICK, Maine — Chaz Wing was 12 when they cornered him in the school bathroom. The students who tormented him were children, too, entering the age of pimples and cracking voices.
Eventually, he swore under oath, the boys raped him and left him bleeding, the culmination of a year of harassment. Though Chaz repeatedly told teachers and administrators about the insults and physical attacks, he didn’t report being sexually assaulted until a year later, launching a long legal fight over whether his school had done enough to protect him.
Across the U.S., thousands of students have been sexually assaulted, by other students, in high schools, junior highs and even elementary schools — a hidden horror educators have long been warned not to ignore.
Relying on state education records, supplemented by federal crime data, a yearlong investigation by The Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to
spring 2015.
That figure represents the most complete tally yet of sexual assault among the nation’s 50 million students in grades K-12. But it also does not fully capture the problem: Attacks are greatly underreported.
And with school reputations and funding at stake, there is tremendous pressure to hide such violence.
The attacks AP tracked ranged from rape and sodomy to forced oral sex and fondling. Assaults occurred anywhere students were left unsupervised. No type of school was immune, whether it be in a wealthy suburb, inner city or farm town. And all types of children were targeted.
About 5 percent of reported attacks involved 5and 6-year-olds. Incidents jumped between ages 10 and 11 — typically the start of middle school — and continued rising until age 14, when they began dropping as students progressed through high school.
Unwanted fondling was the most common form of assault. About one in five of the abused kids were penetrated in some way.
The data also showed sexual assaults by peers were more common than those by teachers, which receive far more attention. For every adult-on-child sexual attack reported at school, there were seven by students.
Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia tracked student sexual assaults, though some only when incidents led to student discipline. Some of the nation’s largest school districts claimed zero sexual assaults over several years, even though AP found cases in court records or local media reports.