K–12 School Employee Sexual Abuse and Misconduct: An Examination of Policy Effectiveness

ABSTRACT

Despite federal and state laws and policies aimed at preventing sexual misconduct by school employees, one in ten American students will experience sexual abuse or misconduct at the hands of a K-12 school employee. To explore why such sexual misconduct continues to occur, this study examined the effectiveness of education policies by investigating whether and how school employees understand these policies, how they are implemented, and how loopholes may undermine their intent. This qualitative case study was conducted in three Virginia school districts and included 46 semi-structured interviews with school district employees and county, state, and federal government employees associated with cases of school employee sexual misconduct, and extensive document analysis of school policies and procedures, laws, and court records. Analyses revealed an absence of policy implementation, demonstrated most seriously by a lack of awareness and understanding of policies among school employees, underreporting, and ineffective data collection. The study also identified a number of loopholes in the implementation of policies, resulting from a mismanaged intergovernmental system. The analysis suggests that understanding and implementation of policies meant to prevent sexual misconduct by school employees are fragmented; this fragmentation may be contributing to the continued prevalence of sexual misconduct by school employees.

KEYWORDS:

• School employee sexual misconduct
• educator sexual abuse
• sexual abuse
• student safety
• education policy
• intergovernmental system
• symbolic interactionism

Disclosure of Interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical Standards and Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all participants for being included in the study.

Notes

1 Media reports and researchers have documented lists of cases at a local or state level, but these lists represent only the reported cases and their definitions vary. Unfortunately, in the United States there is no federal data collection system to track and analyze the prevalence of school employee sexual misconduct leaving Shakeshaft’s reanalysis of the American Assoication of University Women (AAUW) survey from 2001 as the most recent generalizable student survey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Billie-Jo Grant

Billie-Jo Grant, has a Ph.D. in Educational Research, Statistics and Evaluation from the Curry School at the University of Virginia and is a professor at California Polytechnic State University. She is an experienced quantitative and qualitative methodologist, researcher, and evaluator and was the principal investigator on a 2015 – 2017 Department of Justice funded study, examining school employee sexual misconduct policy implementation nationwide.

Walter Heinecke, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Education Research, Evaluation & Policy at the University of Virginia, Curry School of Education. His areas of expertise are policy, research methods and evaluation. He currently conducts research on the role of universities in preparing citizens for the democracy, civic engagement and activism, as well as STEM in educational reform.