NY- 'A violation of trust'

3-27-2008 New York:

When it comes to teachers and students, there is no such thing as consensual sex, experts said Thursday.

The power differential is too exploitative in those sexual encounters, said Charol Shakeshaft, a former Hofstra University professor who now teaches educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University and is an expert on sexual abuse in schools.

"It's a violation of trust and professional boundaries," Shakeshaft said of a March 20 encounter Nassau police say happened between Heather Kennedy, 25, a math teacher at Wantagh High School, and a 16-year-old boy who is a student at the school.

Kennedy was arraigned Thursday on charges of statutory rape and endangering the welfare of a child. The age of sexual consent in New York state is 17, police said.

Even if the boy wasn't in Kennedy's class, Shakeshaft said the mere fact that he attended the same school indicates "sexual exploitation and bad judgment," she said.

And when the teacher is a woman and the student is a boy, the sensationalist aspects of these liaisons are magnified, Shakeshaft said.

"I believe that females get a lot more attention [in the media] because I think it adds another dimension," she said. "People don't seem to think it's child abuse then."

It's a double standard fueled by popular perceptions of older women with younger men, according to Mike Lew, a Brookline, Mass., psychotherapist who has treated and written about survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

"We've been very slow to accept the fact that boys and girls are abused by both men and women," Lew said in an interview after the Feb. 25 arrest of Maria Commins, a Greenport teacher's aide who was charged with raping her son's 15-year-old friend.

"Boys are supposed to be little men," Lew said. "And men are supposed to be up for sex with women under any circumstance. If a boy is abused by a woman, if any part of it was pleasurable ... even if part of that excitement is fear, it tends not to get defined as abuse."

Female offenders often target younger men for a "sense of power," said psychologist Mic Hunter, author of "Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse."

But some offenders don't admit their actions were abusive: Commins told police that she and her victim were in love, and Seattle teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, 43, married her former sixth-grade pupil after she served 71/2 years in prison on charges that she had raped him.

"They believe they're victims or they're equals," said Hollida Wakefield, a psychologist in Northfield, Minn., who has treated sex offenders and victims. "It's hard for them to comprehend that it's criminal." ..more.. by SOPHIA CHANG AND CHRISTINE ARMARIO