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Teachers who have affairs with pupils over 16 are behaving appallingly. But they're not sex offenders
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Michele Hanson
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 7 2008
Uproar in schools again, this time over teachers who have affairs with pupils over 16, in the same school. Should they be prosecuted and put on the sex offenders register? The law and the NSPCC say yes, but Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, says no. She believes it's not a sexual offence, it's "a serious error of professional misjudgment". And she's right.
But I do remember, when I was teaching music in a London comprehensive in the 70s, one particularly ghastly fellow who ought to have been sent to the slammer. He wore his shirt open to the waist, made vilely suggestive remarks to girl pupils, and was eventually sacked when one girl told her parents. Or was he? In those days it was difficult to sack a teacher. You had to lie and give them a good reference, so that the next school took the stinkers on. That is what had happened at our school, which didn't know he'd had an affair with a sixth-former at the previous school. Now it's easier to sack a teacher. Or perhaps it's too easy.
I asked a teacher friend about this, who must be nameless. "It's such a nervous area," he says. You dare not touch a girl, free celebrity sex tapes or a boy, for any reason whatsoever in a school. Pupils will start shouting paedophile, and everyone will believe them. That's another thing Keates is justifiably worried about: malicious allegations. I've been accused of assault, falsely, but in came the parents, ready to punch me on the nose. What would those parents do to a suspected sex offender?
These "affairs" may be ill-advised, an abuse of trust and gross professional misconduct on the part of the teachers, but that's all they usually are. Besides, what else do most people of 16 to 18 think about except sex, sex, sex and relationships? It's the peak age for volcanic crushes, jealousies, falling-outs and discoveries. The classroom is a hotbed of swirling heaven-knows-what, where no one really knows what they're sex school doing or what they want. And A-level girls are very attractive. Perhaps they think their male classmates are immature. Then along comes a young teacher, just out of university, who doesn't know where to draw the line, or doesn't care, or falls in love, or takes advantage of the situation. Or an older teacher, who ought to know better, thinks he has fallen in love, as our former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead did decades ago. Only after the girl had left, mind you. He swears it. The relationship continued Erotic Cartoon Sex for sex storys nine years. year old sex He may have been a grisly inspector and husband, but he wasn't a criminal.
My teacher friend was once obliged to take a 20-year-old, fabulously attractive student teacher into his A-level English classes. All the boys were in turmoil, all the male teachers queueing up in the staff room to make her coffee. What are we supposed to do about that?
How wonderful that Mr Brown and Mr Mandelson appear to have made up again after 14 years of hatred. Imagine all those years of poisonous bile, titanic loathing, tantrumming, sniping and squabbling, and now they're chums again, sex offender list fighting for the same cause. I do admire them. Because it's not an easy thing to do, to stop hating someone.
I tend to go on and on doing it. So does Rosemary, so did my mother, and it's a bad thing to do. "You must let go of your hatred," a friend once advised me. "It's corrosive." She's probably right, but sex with dog I like to hang on to it, like a comforter. Sometimes I even lull myself to sleep thinking hateful, bitter thoughts of ex-friends and partners. "The bastard/cow," I think. "How could he/she have done that? What a cheek. Why did senior sex pics I put up with it? What a wet." And then, soothed by the familiar groove of hatred and self-loathing, I am soon fast asleep.
Then last week I heard that someone I don't like, because years ago she suddenly didn't like me and wouldn't say why, now seems to want to be friends again, because she's forgotten how horrid she was. But I, of course, haven't forgotten. And never will. Sometimes I forget these things for a while, and then a little reminder pops up: a place, a hardcore sex videos bit of music, a topic in these columns, sex vidieos which reminds me of these figures from my past, so I dredge up Extrem Zoo Sex their misdeeds and mull over them, or write or blab about them, which I think is better than silently festering. Not everyone approves of my method.
"Will you please stop writing about Him," says American Cousin. "People will think you still care." But I Aunt S Sex Lessons 3d don't really care. I just like a bit of bitterness-speak - a sort of emotional enema that lets Horse Sex Tape all the nastiness out, and probably saves me from stomach ulcers.
"It's not just mild bitterness," observes Fielding. "You sound like the sort of person who sticks pins into dolls. You've got to try forgiveness." Which is easy for him to say. He does do hatred sometimes, but tends to forget about it for long periods, because it's too tiring to keep it going. "I haven't got the energy," he says. "It's not Sex In Waxhaw Nc a moral decision. I shit sex just can't be bothered. But when I get drunk, it all comes back and turns into murderous hate." Then, tottering home from the public house, he often passes a high crane at the end of his street and longs for his ex-line manager and all the other swine who have made his life a misery to be dangling from it, hopefully in a gibbet. For ever.
We must just hope and pray that Brown and Mandelson never turn to drink.
This week Michele saw Drawing Breath Recycled, at Whitstable Horsebridge Gallery: "An exhibition about breathing, curated by Jean Fraser - a mixture of montages, maps, x-ray lightboxes, sound installations and a driftwood bicycle." She also saw Chosen on More 4: "Three brave men describe their sexual abuse at a school. Profoundly affecting and harrowing."
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Michele Hanson: Teachers who have affairs with pupils over 16 are behaving appallingly. But they're not sex offenders
This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday October 07 2008 on Double Penetration Sex Photos p9 of the Comment & features section. It was last updated at 00.06 on October 07 2008.
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