Troy Mansfield

Sexual misconduct plagues U.S. schools / http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/21/teacher.sex.abuse.ap/index.htmlThis article clearly demonstrates a problem when a sex offender in Pennsylvania gets busted for wrongfully touching a young girl in middle school. In the article, a 68 year old man gets caught for the second time sexually assulting a minor in class. In the States, there are over 3 million educators, and an alarming 3 per school day are offenders. Its hard to catch offenders because it is rarly reported. This is because students are afraid that no one will believe them or that the teacher will do something terrible. This leads to a hard case because hardly no evidence is recorded making it hard to criminalize them. Many abusers have a number of victems but some just work on a single individual such as Troy Mansfield. Troy was a football coach who obsessed over a Heather Kline. He made her skip class and as a result, get suspended. He targeted her in his third grade class and held onto her until she was nearly an adult. This essentially ruined her life. She talks about never living a childhood because she was always hanging out with him by getting rides and treats. Troy is going to serve a sentence of around 31 years in prison. In a seven month investigation there were around 2500 teachers who lost their teaching licences and there were around 1800 cases of victems. Its proven that 9 out of 10 offenders are male, and these males do not always target females.This is extremely alarming to me. That there are so many cases of sexual abuse in the public school system. There are so many cases and not enough penalities. People who get busted on their first time should never be allowed to teach another class as long as they live. The article states that there are so many cases in public school because a teaching licence is required and in private schools, they are not. Im not quite sure how this has anything to do with the numbers because you would think that becoming a public school teacher is harder to become. If this is the case, then why do so many people feel the need to abuse kids and risk it all. Many of these people probably have wives, kids and even grandkids in some cases. This is no way for a person of this age to act. It is also alarming to me that so many people actually get away with these criminal acts just by simply backing out of their careers. I think that they should be hunted down and punished for what they have done. They estimate that one in 10 kids actually report these crimes. I dont know why this is. I think that teachers, principals etc, should talk to their kids and get the message out there that some kinds of touch is bad, and they should report it right away. If they do this I think that the there will be more students coming forward with their problems.