Dr Hollingworth has once again referred to a female student "starting a relationship". Let's take some of the emotion out of this and look at the facts.
When I was a young man I was a post-primary teacher. (I am now neither young nor a teacher). Every young male teacher has girls of the age 14-16 that have a crush on them. I suspect the same is true in the ministry. For a young adult male this is very flattering, it does the ego the world of good.
It is completely natural phenonemon, adolesent girls do this. The important thing is how it is handled by the male teacher. If it is handled correctly it can assist this girl in her transition to a mature, well balanced woman. At the other end of the scale it could emotionally cripple her for life.
The determining factor here is the maturity of the male teacher and how they handle it. Here are the 3 possible ways of handling this:
1. You can tell her she is beautiful and you are immensely flattered by her attention but you are already in a relationship. That she is so nice that you are sure she will find a kind and gentle man to love her. She will probably be disappointed but, her self esteem improved, she will be more empowered to find a good man.
2. You can ignore her, or demean her, and she will be hurt but she will recover and be more cautous next time.
3. If you are very immature, you can pretend to yourself that a healthy relationship is possible and commence to sexually abuse her. In which case she will probably be scarred for life.
Note: Sexual abuse is NEVER started by the victim and relationships between teachers and students are ALWAYS sexual abuse. These are girls learning about relationships and life and we do not want immature men undermining their self-worth and self-confidence. Dr Hollingworth clearly does not understand this.
Update (thanks Dan)
The teacher referred to in the article was a woman initiating a lesbian relationship. Bad assumption on my part but, sadly, my gender is the usual perpetrator of sexual abuse. The comments clearly should be extended to include female teachers You really would have thought they would have had more empathy and compassion having been there themselves.
There are many jewels hidden amongst the leaves in this forgotten part of the ancient forest. Spend some time browsing and you are sure to find some. Click here or continue your search below
or read the most recent entries here.Chris, it seems that you have made an assumption that this case dealt with a male teacher and a female student - in fact the teacher was also female.
Posted by: dan at May 28, 2003 11:15 AMYou're correct I did make that assumption, sadly for my gender, we are usually the perpetrators. It's a bit irrelevant really. There is no reason that female teachers are not in the same boat as the male teachers. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse regardless of the gender of the perpetrator.
Posted by: chris at May 28, 2003 11:22 AMThe thing that I found interesting about this, was that I too had assumed it was a male teacher. I went back and looked at the other articles and realised that any reference to the gender of the coach (she apparently was not employed as a teacher) had been carefully excised.
I got to wondering why. I have seen plenty of similar articles where it is clear that the perpertrator is a male, even when he is not named. The media clearly knew about it, as evidenced by the controversy over the GG's media adviser leaking comments to the press suggesting that the reason the parents complained was because it was a lesbian relationship.
Perhaps, in the media or otherwise, it was thought that this piece of information might indeed make a difference to our perceptions of the incident.
Posted by: dan at May 28, 2003 02:03 PM
Stumble It!