Did a teenage Casanova seduce his former teacher?
In the end, Brittany Zamora and her attorney tried to portray the abuser as the victim. As if she’d fallen under the spell of a pubescent Casanova.
That would never happen if the accused had been a man.
Zamora, the former teacher, got 20 years in prison for sexually molesting her 13-year-old student.
Twenty years may not be enough, but it is not nothing.
I know this because for a long time women in Arizona who were guilty of the same crimes against other boys got exactly that … nothing.
But while the price of abusing boys has gone up, the difference in perception for boy victims and girl victims has not. Not enough, anyway.
Years ago a sex-crimes detective explained his frustration over the false dichotomy to me this way, “As far as too many people in society see it, girls get raped. Boys get lucky.”
The ugly old double standard hasn’t gone away. Zamora and her lawyer proved it.
Zamora said after her sentencing, “It’s shocking to me how others are so quick to judge based on hearing accusations from only one side of the story.”
What would the other side of the story be?
That a full-grown woman was seduced by a 13-year-old boy?
Sorry, but there is no “other side of the story” when it comes to an adult abusing a child.
Zamora’s lawyer, Belen Olmedo Guerra, made the idiot comment, “This was not between a young child and Brittany — this was a teenager.”
Actually, counselor, a 13-year-old IS a child.
If this had been a man and a girl I’d guess the guilty adult would have received more than the 20-year minimum that was prescribed in Zamora’s case. Still, 20 years is a big improvement. In the late 1980s, a 40-year-old librarian’s assistant named Suzanne Yeager had a sexual affair with a 14-year-old boy. She was sentenced to three years’ probation.
The judge in the case said that ”a crime perpetrated by a woman on a male child is not the same as a crime perpetrated by a male on a female child.”
The prosecutor in that case told me at the time, ”There are prosecutors in this state that probably wouldn’t even have filed in this case…I know it’s a double standard, but nobody felt she deserved hard prison time.”
In 1997, Catherine Moutos-Maass, a 35-year-old former language-arts teacher at Deer Valley High School, got six months for having sex with a minor, a former student, at a party in the desert.
The judge in that case said, “The male is considered to be more powerful and dangerous, more able to assert his will, more aggressive and more able to force more contact.”
That same year a similar case in Washington state made national news. A 35-year-old teacher, Mary Kay LeTourneau, had sex with a sixth-grade boy and gave birth to his child. She was sentenced to six months in jail.
We’ve gotten a lot better over time, narrowing the perception gap between male and female offenders, and closing as well the punishment gap.
But all too often we fall for the notion that a female offender can also be a victim. On the day of her sentencing Zamora said, “I am a good and genuine person who made a mistake and regret it deeply. I lived my life respecting and trying to obey every law. I’m not a threat to society by any means.”
Can you imagine us falling for that line from a man in a similar position?
The boy in her case was 13. It’s difficult to tell what this will do to him and his family as time passes. In some abuse cases the boys involved have been reported to feel guilty and confused over the punishment their offenders receive. That shouldn’t surprise us. After all, how can we expect children to know what a victim is, when too many grown-ups still don’t know what a criminal is?