Story making the front page of the local section, a female teacher is accused of a relationship with a 13 year old female student.
At the time of the relationship, the teacher was 25 and the relationship is alleged to have lasted four years. The article does not specify if she was directly the student’s teacher though, as she was a P.E. coach, it seems likely that she had some position of authority.
I think it is always important to break these stories down rather than simply write them off as child abuse. The fact that she was likely the student’s teacher is certainly a violation of professional ethics, even if she didn’t have much caché to argue coercion (her role as a volleyball coach perhaps could hold more.) The age range is certainly large enough to make one uneasy.
Yet, the claim is the relationship continued for four years and is just coming to light four years after that. I don’t know what sparked the investigation finally, and that would be important to know. If the student (now 21) came forward at this point, there is some reason to expect that the relationship was more abusive or traumatic. If the charges came about from another source, it is entirely possible that the relationship was consensual (putting aside legal recognition of consent).
The context really matters on these things. This is one of the reasons I argue that age of consent laws are not productive. They ban a whole class of sexual relationships to make things easy, but take no consideration of the facts of the case. I think if you look at most cases of statutory rape where trauma occurs, you’d also find other factors that qualify as rape, without considering the age factor directly. Because at the end of the day, it isn’t this arbitrary notion of age (when can someone consent, what gap is appropriate) that causes the harm, it is the dynamics of the relationship.
