Teacher-pupil affairs can be a good thing, says academic
A LEADING academic has angered children’s campaigners by claiming sexual liaisons between pupils and teachers can sometimes be ‘positive’.
Pat Sikes, a senior education lecturer at Sheffield University, said students were not always exploited in such relationships.
According to the 50-year- old, who married her own former teacher, around 1,500 pupil- staff relationships develop every year.
In a research paper, she highlights the view that an ‘ erotic charge’ can often be characteristic of good teaching.
But her comments were attacked as misguided. Phillip Noyes, director of public policy for the NSPCC, said: ‘Children spend the majority of their day at school and teachers have a unique relationship with their pupils which should never be abused.’ A spokesman for Child- Line said: ‘ I don’t think her comments will be influential but they are very unhelpful.
‘ The Sexual Offences Act was designed with a welcome emphasis on protecting children and young people, rather than on the rights of the small number of pupils over the age of consent who engage in sexual relationships on equal terms with a teacher.’
Dr Sikes’s paper – Scandalous Stories and Dangerous Liaisons: When Female Pupils and Male Teachers Fall in Love – is based on interviews with colleagues and pupils over the last 25 years.
It is aimed at refuting the view that all such relationships are ‘illegitimate, abusive and exploitative’.
Dr Sikes said a recent change in the law which criminalised affairs between teachers and under- 18s turned students into victims.
But it was often pupils who initiated genuine relationships. The paper, published in the Times Educational Supplement, questions the view that a teacher is exploiting a pupil if a relationship eventually develops.
Dr Sikes argues that expressions of sexuality provided ‘a major currency’ in everyday school life.
‘Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the seductive nature and “erotic charge” often characteristic of “ good” teaching which provokes a positive and exciting response,’ she adds.
Dr Sikes admitted some might find the contents of her paper ‘ questionable and maybe even dangerous and irresponsible’.
But she added: ‘Women do need to be protected against some men and girls need to be protected against some male teachers but preferably not through blanket laws which have the effect of making all women into weak potential victims.’
Dr Sikes, who lives in Doncaster, first met her husband in 1970. She was a 14-year- old on her first day at a new school and he was a 22-yearold teacher.
Despite the mutual attraction, the relationship did not begin until two years later when he left the school. They now have two teenage children.
Last month Shelley White, 25, from Sheffield, was found guilty of ‘snogging’ a 15-year- old boy in her class. She will be sentenced later this month and placed on the sex offenders’ register.
In June English teacher Nicola Prentice, 25, was given a 12-month suspended sentence after admitting sleeping with a pupil at a Nottingham school after he turned 16.
s.harris@dailymail.co.uk