I was hoping Mudede would chime in with Abelard and Heloise, his young student--famous lovers in the 12th century. 800 years later John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous Harvard economist, married a Radcliffe coed. It happens.

I think the reason it's an issue now is because for all the well-known examples of success--which is certainly possible in this kind of relationship--the problem begins with the vast majority of UNsuccessful relationships of this sort--which because of the power inversion and life situations involved, have virtually no repurcussions for the teacher but can easily destroy the student, emotionally or professionally. It's not fair, simply put.

The big deal with Letourneau wasn't that Vili was a student but that he was a young child. She started grooming him for eventual sex when he was what, ten?

I also seem to recall a female friend in high school being romantically involved with one of our teachers. And I think they got married shortly after she graduated. Everyone thought it was icky and weird and probably a bad thing, but no one thought either of them should be put in jail.

Some nuance, from someone on the front lines of this kind of nonsense:

First, student-teacher sex is as old as students and teachers. What's new nowadays is gender equity (ie, teenage boys who used to be thought "lucky" to have a relationship with an older woman are now considered rape victims, since what's rape for the goose is rape for the gander) and unrealistic hyperexpectations regarding equality in relationships in general.

Teacher-student relationships have unequal power ratings. So do relationships where one partner is better looking, richer, younger, smarter, or a better cook. So what?

And, FNARF, as for the UNsuccessful relationships, aren't the vast majority of relationships unsuccessful? I mean, 50% divorce rates just mean that half of all relationships that lead to marriage fail, but how many people marry the first or third or even tenth person they have a relationship with? Very few. I'd be the actual "UNsuccessful" relationship rate is like 99%. So the rates of UNsuccessful student-teacher relationships probably fall right into the normal range.

That said, I'm a college professor and I'd never date or get involved sexually with a student. It's like incest as far as I'm concerned: I'm a poweful (to them, at least) older figure who can affirm or destroy their sense of themselves, and mixing that up with fucking is just asking for end-of-career trouble, not to mention actual guilt.

I forgot to mention that the Seattle Prep story in the paper today was a female-female hookup. If that makes a difference.

seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/263160_coach17.html

Gillian

Female-female hookup does indeed change it slightly, by proving that lesbians are just as likely to do really stupid things as straight men and women. But think about the uproar that would follow if it were a gay man and an underage boy. The shitstorm would make Katrina look like a spring shower.

Bill

I think this has been a problem for years. What's new is the media coverage. It's a recent development that, socially, we are willing to look critically at the fact that older women in positions of authority are raping teenage boys, statutorily or otherwise. In the past, rape and molestation was assumed to be solely the criminal purview of men and pedophiles.

My high school creative writing teacher was knocked-up by and subsequently married a student. His utterly Mormon parents were, though horrified, quite supportive about the whole ordeal nonetheless. They had to be for the sake of their son and granddaughter. It was also a different cultural climate.

At the University where I currently work, it is frowned upon for faculty to become involved with students. It happens and not infrequently.

The difference is that college students are at a minimum legal (despite the inequity of power distribution in the dynamic).

Thanks for your comments, Bill. I believe that the power dynamic is indeed the main issue. It is inherently uneven and unfair, even if both parties are willing. There also seems to be too much room for damage for everyone involved.

Bill, I wasn't suggesting that the rate of failure of relationships was higher for teacher-student ones. I was suggesting that the devastating effects of failure are grossly unequal--for the teacher it's unlikely to be a big deal, at least professionally, but for the student it can affect his or her whole future career. It's a power thing.

When I was sixteen I had a M4M sexual relationship with my extremely hot 34 YO Spanish teacher. I thought he was probably a creep at the time, and now at 30 the thought of sleeping with a high school student is repulsive, but MAN was that hot. Thank you, Mr. Spanish teacher, you fuckin' hot creep.

I believe practically every female friend in college had a story about having an affair with a high school teacher. I exaggerate, but I can count at least a dozen without recollecting very hard. At least two male high school classmates (one out, one not) had affairs with teachers who taught classes they were in (one out, one not).

when she was about 23, a female middle school classmmate ended up marrying our 7th grade humanities teacher. we all thot this was kinda creepy, but then the finale: she found kiddie porn on his computer and reported him to the cops.

One explanation for this growing phenomenon is the pool of available teachers. While once regarded as a noble, trustworthy profession, teaching has always paid squat. Too bad. Everybody agrees teachers should be paid more, but whenever anyone suggests raising taxes to pay for that, the yelling starts. And no one yells louder than parents with children in school. Irony. So talented, morally honed people who would become teachers don't because they need to eat and support themselves and their families leaving more in the available pool who aren't so in tune with the right thing to do. And remember there was a time not so very long ago when just about the only professions open to women were nursing and teaching. Woman have more choice now - thank goodness - but again some of the best and brightest go on to other things more rewarding financially and otherwise.

Not too long ago, my mom used to work as an AIDS counselor in a county public health department in the midwest. According to her, there were teacher-student relationships (of all types - man-boy, man-girl, woman-boy, woman-girl) in various local high schools all the time, that never made it into the news. Probably there were even more than she knew about - they only came to her when they wanted a free STD test.

In the interest of maintaining client trust, neither she nor anyone else at the department ever reported anything to the police. Of course they didn't have any legal shield, so if anyone was ever prosecuted they would have had to testify in court. But no one ever was prosecuted. Usually the school found out about it, and quietly forced the teacher to resign and find a non-teaching job.

She now lives in the Seattle suburbs (and works in a totally different field), and to her it seems that this sort of thing is reported to the police more often in Seattle. I'm guessing that in the past, everywhere was like the place where she worked, nothing was reported to the police, and the public never heard about what happened.

I had a high school science teacher who divorced his wife shortly after I graduated, to date a former classmate that was a year my senior. The two had openly flirted between classes constantly during my time there.

Another teacher got kicked out after the school found out he was seeing a student.

I think this has been happening well before the publicity with MKL, and it's only publicized now for the same reason we see a lot of things recently for the first time: the proliferation of media in our culture has given us far more coverage on the world than we've ever had before.

Agree with the first post here that this has been happening as long as there have been teachers and students...but I really do wonder why it's so newsworthy now.

I went to a large (>3500) high school (30 years ago!?!) and there were both female and male teachers/counselors sleeping with both male and female students and no one seemed to do much more than wink, wink, nudge, nudge over it.

Harper's ran a wonderful article several years back analyzing rates of child abduction...no historical differences, even though media at the time were making it seem like it was the newest epidemic on the block.

Are we just more sensitive to it now? Are students more sexually advanced than before? Has Mary Kay Letourneau ruined it for everyone? Is it only now being seen as predatory?

All of the above. Galbraith couldn't get away with marrying a coed in today's university.

I don't think low pay necessarily contributes to these relationships: After all, one doesn't have to be a teacher to violate age-of-consent laws.