Are Our Children Safe?

One of our little societal problems is that, while it’s OK to attack Wal-Mart for failing to provide heroic levels of health insurance for its employees, and it’s OK to criticize the military for failing to accommodate women and gays, and it’s OK to pile onto the Catholic Church for covering up its pedophile problem, there are other institutions that seem to get a pass.

Public schools, for example. For over a generation we have known that public schools are failing to teach our children. But “our teachers” still seem to enjoy the support of the American people.

But suppose that public schools were a sink of pedophilia?

We’ve already had national scandals out of adult women teachers having affairs with minor boy students. And now there is the curious case of John Karr, confessed suspected killer of JonBenet Ramsey.

Karr is a teacher.

Writes Tom Hoopes, executive editor of The National Catholic Register, where’s the outrage?

To coin a phrase: Mr. President, Are Our Children Safe?

Imagine if the suspected killer of Ramsey were a Catholic priest. Imagine the outrage.

But, according to a report authored by Hofstra University scholar Charol Shakeshaft, the problem of sexual abuse in public schools is 100 times the problem in the Catholic Church.

As the National Catholic Register’s reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.



Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools.

So why is that?

The fact is that institutions like public schools, labor unions, liberal activist groups, sexual activist groups, environmental groups, etc. all get a pass from the drive-by media.

It’s not hard to understand why. Liberals in the media trust their friends in the public schools, the labor unions, etc. They know that they are on the same side.

One fine day this whole informal conspiracy of silence will collapse.

But meanwhile, America has to ask a tough question. Are our children safe in these public schools?