Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #531 How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It! With Dr. Charol Shakeshaft

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#531 How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It! With Dr. Charol Shakeshaft · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Tom Hampson is my co-host as we continue our discussion on stolen innocence, a grassroots effort to guard our children's innocence and assist parents and educators to fill our children and their hearts with all that's true, good and beautiful.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: With that said, we're grateful and honored to be with Dr Cheryl Shakeshaft, who's joining us today.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Dr Shakeshaft has been studying equity in schools for more than four decades, is the author of four books and more than 200 referred articles and papers, many of which have received national and state awards.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Her research focuses on three strands gender and leadership, sexual abuse of students by other students and or adults employed in schools, and the effectiveness of technology for learning, particularly for students of color.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: She's a professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, has a book scheduled for release in November titled Organizational Betrayal how Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and how to Stop it.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Dr Cheryl Shake Shaft welcome.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Thank you, glad to be here.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Tom, I'm going to let you lead us off here and get into a discussion on these things let you lead us off here and get into a discussion on these things, okay.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm really interested in the study that you did in 2004 for the US Department of Education on educator sexual misconduct.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: I wonder if you could talk about how that came about and what the response was to the results of your study.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Well, one of the senators US senators had requests from constituents to try to understand whether or not there was sexual abuse of students by teachers in schools, because there had been incidences in their school district, and so he brought forth a bill that was approved, to have a national study done, and I was selected to do that study.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: My charge was not to do an original study, but rather to present to Congress what we knew from every kind of research that had been done about the sexual abuse of kids by school employees, and so that's what I did.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: I looked at every study that had been done, I combined data, I redid analyses of their original data and came through with that report about the extent of sexual misconduct across the board by school employees towards students.
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: So how was that received by Congress?
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: First I didn't realize it was done for Congress, I thought it was a DOE.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: But how was it received by Congress?
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Well, it was published through the DOE, but it was a report to Congress and yawns.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah well.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: The report was presented.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: I didn't hear anything back from Congress, so I don't know how it was, how it came across.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: I do know how it?
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: came across to the public.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: How did it come across to the?
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: public.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: Some people didn't believe it and some people thought the study didn't go far enough, you know, and thought there was probably more sexual abuse than I'd reported, and some thought there was probably less sexual abuse than I had reported, and so and some people were in the middle, so I mean it did cause people to start to think about this in ways I believe they hadn't thought about it before, and I think that's because there was so much data that was presented in the report, so it wasn't about opinions, it wasn't about what people thought.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: This was actual data from across the country, so it alerted people that this was an issue.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: Whether it was 10% of kids or 5% or 8% or whatever percentage it might have been, my study said close to 10% across the studies that I looked at.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: What it said was that this is real and we need to do something about it.
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: Well, it happened to be right about the same time that the Boston Globe broke the story about the scandal in the Catholic Church involving the sexual exploitation of children by priests and other religious people.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: Do you feel that the results of your study were overwhelmed by all of that publicity regarding the Catholic Church?
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: Because, I'll tell you, I wound up being retained by the state of Illinois to investigate the issue here, and your study never even came to my attention during that.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: And yet years later I discovered that you made the comment that the problem in schools was 100 times worse than the problem in the Catholic Church.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: I just wonder, how did it get buried worse?
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: than the problem in the Catholic Church.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: I just wonder how did it get buried?
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: Well, I think that people had to.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: I think that people didn't know what to do with it.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: Okay, a parent didn't really know what to do with it.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: If they read this, if they read a news article about it, teachers by and large didn't know what to do about it and many teachers didn't believe that it could possibly be true because they didn't know any other teacher they thought who might be sexually abusing a kid.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: School administrators said, yeah, this happens now and again, but I don't see it as a huge problem and there was no force behind it.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: There was no movement in the Department of Education or by legislators or by anybody else at that time to really respond to it.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: Over time we have gone state by state and worked on legislation and worked on other things that respond initially to my study, but at the time I think it was just one of those stories that was like gosh, I can't believe that or that's terrible, but it doesn't affect me.
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: What would you have liked to seen happen at the time?
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: What would you suggest that we do to reduce this?
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: 10% of kids being sexually exploited just is an enormous number of children.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: That's just huge.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: It is an enormous number of children, and what I would like is for us to have required training in schools, not just of teachers and school employees, but of kids.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: So I'd like kids to know what the boundaries are.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: So little kids get training in some schools, called good touch, bad touch, and essentially the training is just for them to learn that adults aren't supposed to invade their space and that if it feels weird they need to say something because that's their right.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: That good touch, bad touch is pretty innocuous.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: It doesn't go into lots of detail or anything, but it starts with the process of bodily integrity and an adult shouldn't invade that.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: So if an adult wants to hug you and you don't want to be hugged, you can say, no, I don't want to be hugged, and hopefully without somebody saying, oh now, be nice, it's just your uncle, george.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: But that's the point is to help kids, george.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: You know so.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: So you know that, but that's the point is to help kids.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: But we also need to train adults to be observers and reporters.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: In the work I've done, most of the abuse is a slow progression from crossing one line to another line, to another line.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: Each of those lines are things that you're not supposed to do.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: You're not supposed to be hugging students, you're not supposed to be alone with students, you're not supposed.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of things you're not supposed to do and people see that.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: People see someone who's giving a student a ride home, people see someone who's doing some other thing, and they don't report, they don't say so.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: It doesn't go on the radar of the school administration, it doesn't get on the radar to be looked into.
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: For someone to talk to that teacher, for someone to keep their eyes on the teacher, because in fact in the beginning it may not have any meaning at all.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: The teachers crossed a boundary and if somebody intervened and said that's a boundary you're crossing, you can't do that, we're going to have to keep our eyes on you.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: That would probably in the beginning stop the teacher.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: But we don't do that, we don't report, we don't say anything.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: And so boundaries continue to be crossed and crossed until there's sexual misconduct toward the child.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: Well, one of the things that I've found in my investigation it's not just regarding teachers, it's across the board.
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: When I've investigated these incidents where children have been sexually exploited in virtually not virtually in every single case, there are people there that said I knew that there was something was wrong, but I didn't really know what to do about it.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: And it seems like that's the same way it's in the school that if a teacher, teachers oftentimes don't know who they should talk to and they're afraid of talking to the wrong person or it could hurt their own career.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: So how would you, in an educational context, what kind of system would you set up to make it safe for another teacher or an adult in the school system to be able to report their concerns?
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: And how do you think, how should that happen?
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: Well, first, I think we need to train them to report their concerns.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: So, yes, I find in schools the same thing you found in your work that people see things and they say I didn't want to get involved, or it wasn't that big a deal or it seemed creepy to me, but it's not really my place to say anything.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: We need to teach people that it is your place.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: Not only is it your place, it's your responsibility and duty and you're violating your professional ethics by not reporting.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: We need to help them understand that this is just as important as using the right reading program or the best way to teach math, that this is important.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: So that's the first thing.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: The second thing is to be able to build trust within the school and the school administration that if they report, there will be something done, meaning there will at least be an investigation and there will be follow up.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: Very often people say they reported over and over and nothing was ever done, so we have to have action along the way.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Third, what many school systems do is they have anonymous reporting.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: They have a system.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: They have anonymous reporting.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: They have a system online of anonymous reporting and someone can report and say I saw this happen and then it can be investigated, and if it didn't happen, it didn't happen, and if it did, they learn something more and try to figure out what's going on.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: So there are ways we can do that.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Very often in small schools or small school districts or school districts in small towns, everybody knows everyone, their neighbors and then their teachers, and then you know so kids live next door to their teachers.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Kids' parents are best friends with people down the block, with the school principal, with the other teachers, and so there's a lot of conflicting relationships that go on in schools, particularly smaller schools, and you need to acknowledge those too and have a system that provides the safety for a person to report.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the other issues is that very, very often the teacher is beloved by many other teachers and also by parents and kids, and so if somebody complains against them, many people support the teacher who's the abuser rather than support the kid that's being sexually abused or the parents that have filed a complaint or another teacher that's filed a complaint.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: That makes it a very unsafe system for doing anything, even the administration.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: When they try to do something, the administration becomes the enemy.
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: When they try to do something, the administration becomes the enemy.
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: So have you done any work with the unions to try to enlist them into the process as well, not just the administration and individual teachers?
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: I have done work with unions and again, they have a role in terms of what their job is and theirs is not necessarily to agree with the teacher but to support that they get their constitutional rights to be able to be investigated, investigated.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: So they have a role.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: But my experience with unions, particularly in the last several years, has been that they understand this is an issue and some unions are trying to do training within their union, supported by the union, to teach people about how to report and what the issues are.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: And also I've seen the unions and this is a shift.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: So I've seen a shift.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: I've seen the unions working with their constituencies to say things like these are the allegations, step back, let's just let the investigations happen as they should.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: We'll make sure that everything is done by the book, but step back and wait and see.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: So I have seen a shift in terms of the unions.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: But in general, that's the message you want to give to everyone, which is, if you're giving education to parents, parent groups, church groups, other groups, you're going to let them know that sometimes a predator or sometimes an abuser can be someone who people think is the best teacher around and who has done wonderful things for your child.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: You have to be able to hold two things that you think of as opposite before you.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: A person could be sexually abusing one child, but changing the life of another child.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: One child but changing the life of another child.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: The fact that we have portrayed people who sexually abuse kids as kind of universally evil makes it difficult for people to understand the complexity of the human race.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: And so somebody may have done wonderful things for many kids never harmed them, never done anything but at the same time also sexually abused other kids, and we have to be able to understand that and step back and let the process of investigation happen you've done across the country.
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: One of the things that I've noticed in my work is that there's a wildly different capability of investigation from school district to school district and state to state.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: Have you seen that in your work and, if so, how would you improve the investigations in the various districts across the country?
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: Should there be a standard that should apply nationwide?
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: Well, one way I would improve it.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: But first of all, we tell school districts.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: If there's an allegation of sexual misconduct toward a student by a school employee, the first thing you do is bring the police in.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: This is a crime.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: So you're hearing a report of a crime.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: You're not hearing a report of.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: You know this teacher gave my son a D and my son deserved an A.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: You know this is different.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: So now one of the issues is is not every police force has sexual abuse investigators?
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: So the issue is what you want is a sexual abuse investigator, someone who knows about sexual abuse and knows how to investigate.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: Most police forces, if they don't have one, have the connections to people who do that.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: But if this is a report of a teacher having a sexual interaction with a student, this is a crime.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: It needs to be reported to the police.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: The district needs to step back a little bit and let the police do their job.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: So that's one of the things I'd say because people in schools aren't trained to investigate sexual misconduct and sexual abuse.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: It's not part of our training at any level, whether it's administrator or teacher.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Not all police officers are trained to investigate sexual abuse charges either, but it's a specialization that lies within the police force, and that's where we should turn.
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: Okay, so it would be a uniform standard of a sex crimes investigator to lead the investigation of these cases.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: What about these?
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: How do you deal with these cases?
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: That this grooming behavior that's engaged in by teachers in most jurisdictions is not a crime?
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: How do you deal with that?
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: Well that the school would step in on.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: So if a teacher is giving us particular student gifts but not other students, so a teacher who comes in and brings everybody cupcakes, that's okay.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: A teacher who gives one kid presents, even if they're small presents, or one kid some kind of other extra thing, that's a red flag.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: That's a concern that needs right away to be investigated, to be reported and to be watched.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: The child needs to understand that teachers aren't allowed to do this.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: We're sorry.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: The parents need to understand that your child has been receiving a gift from this teacher.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: It may be helpful to you that your child has been receiving a gift from this teacher.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: It may be helpful to you that your child got the gift.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: For instance, your child couldn't play sports because your child couldn't afford the uniform or afford what was the shoes that were needed.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: This is true in some school districts and the teacher takes care of that.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: There are ways for teachers to chip in and give presents, but not directly.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: So, for instance, if kids can't participate in certain activities that other kids can because their parents don't have the funding to do that, you can have a teacher's fund and teachers can give to that, and then the school gives and gives to the kids.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: So it isn't that teachers can't help a kid, they can help a kid gives and gives to the kids.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: So it isn't that teachers can't help a kid, they can help a kid.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: But there are ways to do it that isn't this direct way of one teacher focused on one kid giving this kind of support.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: So for those behaviors, those behaviors that might be seen as grooming behaviors, or I call them boundary crossings, for those boundary crossings, the school district definitely needs to intervene.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: Stop that, explain to the students, explain to the parents and again, this is the when we're talking about education for students and parents.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: This is the kind of education that you're trying to give them to say, look, teachers aren't allowed to do these things.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Teachers aren't allowed to give you a ride home, unless it's a huge emergency.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Teachers aren't allowed to do this.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: School personnel aren't allowed to do these things.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: And so you need to understand that and not expect that.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: And if it happens, you need to let us know, because we need to make sure that your child is safe.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Let me just Tom, if you don't mind interjecting, because I get so many questions on this that again, I don't know if Illinois, I know that we're not the only anomaly when it comes to this, but one of the things and you may or may not be aware of the national sex ed standards but certain states have adopted them and our state is one of them, and so if you teach sex ed in public school system, then you're supposed to use these standards.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, those standards kind of blur the lines of really what you're saying, because we can all agree with that, we need to watch all of this, but the standards seem like they're normalizing sexual activity, not only in the school system but the culture at large.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: In other words, we have a lot of school libraries that Tom and I have investigated to bring a lot of books in that are normalizing sexual activity, books like Perfectly Normal, and so they're very graphic and they're for 10-year-olds and you go, you know so when you start to think about grooming and all of these issues that we're talking about, and then, on the other hand, we're actually desensitizing our students and our teachers and a culture at whole.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: So we're really fighting a battle here that blurs the lines between you know what is grooming, what is to desensitize a kid or a child for those types of behaviors?
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: Well, I guess I think you and I probably disagree in that, and I may be wrong here, but I haven't seen any books normalizing a 45 year old man having sexual intercourse with a 10 year old in the school libraries in schools that say it's okay to have sex with a 36-year-old woman.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: I haven't seen anything at all like that ever.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: So I think for me there's a confusion between what you're trying to tell kids and what I'm talking about.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: So for me these are different things.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: I see how you have the overall connection in terms of saying we're desensitizing kids or we're normalizing sexual behavior.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: I think that what many of these materials do is try to help kids understand that sexual activity that is consensual among equals comes in many varieties, and I think for me the issue is consent, age appropriate, and that we're trying to.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: I see these.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: I haven't done a study of all the books in the library so I'm not speaking about that.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: I don't have that expertise.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: I've seen, I've read the standards.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: What I see them trying to do is to help kids understand their own sexuality.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: Kids understand their own sexuality, whatever that may be, without a judgment.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: So I just think you and I probably are on different tracks here.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think we're on different tracks, but go ahead, Tom.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: Well, the thing that I see because one of the your focus is more on educator sexual misconduct, but I also have a broader interest in peer-to-peer sexual exploitation, and I've seen in many instances where these younger children of course, in Illinois, for example, you cannot give consent until you're 17.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: But I've seen in many instances kids who are maybe 17, 16, 15, who are sexually exploiting children much younger than them, or even the same age, who have less maturity, that are more naive, that aren't as streetwise in my language anyway and so what you have is these children are being exploited by predatory peers.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: So a lot of the sex ed materials is normalizing that activity and encouraging children to experiment with sex.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: So that's one of the aspects.
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: But the other thing that I've seen is it gives an opportunity for older people, even though the libraries don't have material about old people and kids having sex together.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: It gives the opportunity for these slick predators to talk to children in the language that they've been taught in school and further grooms them into a sexual activity.
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: I've seen it happen, and so this is one of the things that concerns me, and it actually is.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: You even mentioned about this grooming behavior as it relates to pornography and sex talk and sexual exhibitionism.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: They have teachers that are taking kids to pride parades in Chicago, for example.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: Now to me and these are parades where people are semi or totally nude at times these things that to me seems like grooming behavior, not teaching them about sexuality.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: Well, again, I think I might disagree.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: First of all, if you took someone to a pride parade, you might be teaching them about civil rights.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: You might be teaching them about our democracy, about the American way of accepting people as who they are.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: So I think, to make the pride parade be only as if it's some kind of sexualized thing that's going to harm kids, I find that.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: I actually find that incredulous.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Have you been to the pride parade?
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: Let me finish Parents would have had to have agreed for their child to go to the pride parade.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: You'd have to get a parental approval slip for the school to do that.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: So that's the first thing I would say.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: The second thing I would say is is somebody might see a naked person at a pride parade?
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: You're also really working hard to change things that are on TV, to have rules about what kids can watch on TV, to make sure that kids don't have telephones.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: You know, I find there's a kind of it seems to me to be a selective focus there.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: And let me just continue a minute.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: I think there's a difference between having knowledge and not.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: So you say there are predators, which I won't disagree with you.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: There probably are kids who are predators of younger kids.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: But if the younger kids are learning, then that they should say no and they should tell someone.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: And then if somebody's having them do something that they don't want to do or that they shouldn't be doing so, if they learn, hey, if a 12 year old wants you to do this, you can't do this, you gotta.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: You gotta tell somebody if they're learning that.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: And as I read those, those, those standards, I read more that it's trying to give kids information about their own developing sexuality, as well as their rights and privileges as a human being and as a child, and not to be so.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: I'm not, as, first of all, very little sex education actually goes on in schools.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: So let's just get back to that.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: We don't have sex education classes for kids six to eight in schools.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Sex education usually happens in high schools, and so, while these might be the standards of what you might say, nobody's teaching sex education to fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Generally it's high school stuff.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: So there may be some concerns there and they may be legitimate.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: I'm not saying they aren't, but I'm saying at a practical level, the focus of sex education is to help kids understand.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: And you talk about what's happening in schools.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't know.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: I may be older than you guys I'm 75, but I grew up in Iowa.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: I remember kids were having sex when I was a kid.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that because nobody taught me anything.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: So the first time I had sex I said to my boyfriend we have to stop this, because if we don't stop this, we'll be doing it.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: And he said we are doing it.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: You didn't know we were doing it and I said this is it, this is what we're doing.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: I thought this was called petting and he said no, this is it.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: So I immediately went home to my parents and said I've been doing it, what do we do?
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: And my point is is that I had no idea.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: Now I was 17.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: I should, perhaps I should have known.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: I was a straight, a student, I was supposedly smart.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: I didn't have a clue, and I'm sure kids are better than I was.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: But my point is is that we need to teach kids what, what's going on with their bodies and with themselves and what it means.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: And I don't see in those standards that we're doing a great harm to kids, first of all because few people carry them out, but secondly, these are sort of things knowledge that you could have about yourself and your body.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm older than you but I had similar kinds of experiences.
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: They didn't have regular sex education in school, kind of learned it on my own, but I understand that.
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: But there's a big difference between the way we were brought up and some of the materials that are in schools now and somewhere in between, I think might be a better fit.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: But one other thing I'd like to ask you about is are you familiar with a study done last year by Elizabeth Jeglik of John Jay College and several other people that followed up your research on educator sexual misconduct?
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: Are you familiar with that?
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: I am yes.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: Okay, and in their study they said that educator sexual misconduct 11.7% of children are victims of educator sexual misconduct, which is up 2.1% from your study.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: Is that a real increase or do you think that's a variation?
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: It's a 20% variation.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: It seems like it has to be far more than the margin of error that could be.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: But what do you think about that?
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: Is there a real increase happening or are we looking at basically the same as what you found?
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: I don't know the answer to that, and that's a question that lots of us are talking about.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: One of the differences between her study and the data in my study is that the data in my study was collected from kids who were in eighth grade to 11th grade, so it was current data for them.
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: Her data.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: We can no longer.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: Schools will no longer seem to allow us to ask those questions of kids, so we can't do studies like that anymore, to ask those questions of kids.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: So we can't do studies like that anymore.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: And my study was a study that was done by the Harris Poll for the AAUW and I used their data to reanalyze, specifically educator sexual misconduct.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: Jagley's great study was asking and there are two or three other studies that are similar to hers asking college students to look back and report, and so it's hard to say whether it's an increase or not an increase.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: It's a different population.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: The population for the AUW data that I used was all kids, so they weren't necessarily kids who would go on to college or wouldn't go on to college.
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: So there's a difference in the two samples, in the two populations.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: My take on it is 9% 11%.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: It's all too much.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it's increasing and I don't think any of us know for sure, but it's a concern, certainly a concern to me.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: You know, one of the other focuses you have and we're bringing this up now is the sexual abuse of students by other students.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Do you have any?
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: You know?
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: What are your feelings there?
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: What are you seeing there?
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: Well, I think we're, first of all, we're much more aware of it, so we're more likely to report because we do as kids.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: Kids are understanding hey, this shouldn't be happening to me, so you're more likely to get reports now than you used to.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: It used to be.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: You were just supposed to take it, or you thought it was your fault, or you thought this was normal, or you whatever you thought.
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: So what we're seeing is kids who are more aware of the difference between something consensual between them, kissing each other, and somebody forcing them or pressuring them to do something.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: So you would see more pushback and more reports.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: Would see more pushback and more reports.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: So what I'm seeing is kids who are more aware that they have their rights for bodily integrity, no matter who it is and things that we use to consider oh, that's just how boys are, or girls act like this or whatever.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: We don't anymore.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: We say no, that's an infringement, that's not acceptable.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: So what I see is more awareness of the student's right, as a human being, to have control of their own body and themselves, and I think one of the things that the sex education does is actually teaches that.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: To be able, you've got every right to say no, and even if you said yes yesterday, you've got a right to say no today.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: And that's one of the big messages for kids is that they might have said yes to something they thought would be okay and it wasn't okay with another kid, and then they feel like they can't say no now because they already said yes and so the idea that you have that right.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: And so when I look at some of the things that are being taught to kids, I'm seeing much more awareness for kids about what their rights are to their own body, what their rights are and how to navigate being an adolescent.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: I will say I wouldn't like to be an adolescent in these times.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: I think it's really hard.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: I think the things you see that they see on their telephones, the things that they see on TV, the things they see in movies are confusing, and so I think we do need a place where, wherever that might be Maybe it's the church that does that and actually talks frankly about sexual issues and how you manage them.
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: Maybe it's the Boy Scouts, maybe it's the Girl Scouts, maybe it's the classroom, but I think we do need a place to help kids navigate what I see as a really fraught universe.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: That's a very sexualized world.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: I think you're right on there.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: You know, I work with a lot of young men and so they have these questions, dr Shakespeare, you know, because they see these things, they hear about these things in the culture, in schools certainly, but in the culture at large, and then they're curious, and I think one of the big distinctions between you know, our generation, the way we grew up in these kids, is now they can Google it, you know, now they can go on their phones and Google it.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: What we're finding over and over again is these boys especially, but the girls too, and certainly the victims of this.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: So the boys get pulled into pornography and because they're in a vacuum, because nobody has really taught them all these things that we're talking about here, they get really sucked in.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's a very powerful force, right?
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Boys are very image-driven and so they see these images, they get caught up.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: Well, it's amazing how pornographic these young men have become in in general way, bigger than I thought when I first started to speak to to young men about this and found out that almost all of them have viewed hardcore pornography and etc.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: And so now, of course, they look at a, at a woman, a young girl, and now they, they.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: They have a hard time seeing them as someone to love, and then they see, you know, they think it's love but they see them as an object and then they start to sexually abuse them without actually realizing I don't think that they are doing this, and so I guess I'll just follow it up with.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: I think it's so important what you said.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: You know there are different worldviews, different people have different views on sexuality and what their meaning is and human dignity, and I think parents are going to have to make a decision how to share this with their children again, whether it's in the church or who they're going to allow to do that, and so that becomes a very interesting discussion here.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: But we have to do something with these poor kids, because parents are going to have to figure out.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: We can't just push them out there into the world like we did, because the culture was different when we grew up and we could get hurt, but, on the other hand, there was plenty of good people around to steer us in the right direction.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: Today, unfortunately, there's just too it seems to be too many dangers in the road just to leave it for a chance.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: I was just going to say.
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: While you and I may not agree on exactly what is and isn't pornography, I can certainly agree with you.
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: I'm very concerned about pornography and its effects on kids and on our society about pornography and its effects on kids and on our society?
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: Are you familiar with the work of Dr Gene Abel from years ago.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: No, I don't think so.
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: Well, he didn't have anything to do with schools.
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: He focused more on predators, on child sexual predators, but a lot of his work.
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: I'm very familiar with the work he did.
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: I actually interviewed him years ago but essentially, what he found is that 20% of the adults in this country are victims of childhood sexual abuse and it sounds to me like, based on your research, 10% of them are victims of that abuse in schools.
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: So the schools account for half of the problem of childhood sexual abuse.
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: What needs to be done to this sounds like almost a Manhattan-type project that needs to be implemented in order to clean up our schools to make them safe for kids, because it seems like it's pretty unsafe for all children.
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: Well, with your 10% and 10%.
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: Some of the kids may have been sexually abused by both their families and people in schools.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: Right, that's true.
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: But what I would say is that I go back to education.
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: We need some federal laws and federal funding.
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: We need state laws and state funding for part of this.
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: Part of this can just be done without funding.
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: But we need to teach kids and adults and parents about the boundaries appropriate boundaries by school employees.
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: To kids.
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: It's a quick lesson, it's like 15 minutes, and you do it a few times, you keep doing it, you keep repeating it, you keep repeating it, and then we need to follow up.
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: And then we need to follow up on if somebody crosses that boundary, what do you do?
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: And we need to help them practice saying the words, doing the language, writing out a complaint.
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: We need to help them do that.
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: That's a small thing.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: It will make a big difference, I'm quite sure of it.
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: We also need laws across the states where you can't just tell someone to leave and then write them a good recommendation when they are being, you know, hired in another school.
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: And many states have passed those laws, so we need to.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: There's an organization called Enough Abuse and they keep track of what states are doing and what's happening across the country in terms of the kinds of laws and the kinds of education both education laws and laws in general that are helping to decrease the sexual abuse of kids in school.
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: So there's plenty of things that we can do legally, but the simplest thing wouldn't even take a law.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: It would just say that we'll make sure all kids, all school employees and parents have access.
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: We can't force parents, but the other two we can force.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: We can say we're going to give you this 15 to 20 minutes every year to teach you about appropriate boundaries, what to do, what not to do, and when you see something, here's the steps you take and we're going to practice it.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: That's it.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: That would help a lot, that would get rid of a lot.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point, and I know a lot of parents are really starting to do this in the homes, you know being very cognizant of that, and I think that's where it has to begin, because you know, parents are the primary educators.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: They're going to have to pay attention to this.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: Tom, as we wind down here, any last questions or comments, and the same with you, dr Shake Shack, thank you so much for being with us and any last comments.
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: Well, I have thousands of questions and comments.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: Well, you only get one more, Tom, because we got to let her go.
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: That's good.
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: I really appreciate you joining us and for your time, and thank you so much for your insight.
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: I guess what I'd like to say is I find it refreshing that the three of us, who have different views on many things, have some of the same views on one thing, and many more than one thing, and so it just goes for me to show that, reaching across any kind of ideological boundaries and I don't even know what our ideological boundaries are it's important we agree on probably more than we disagree on.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: So thank you for this opportunity.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: Yes, thank you so much, and again, your book's going to come out pretty soon.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: October November.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, very good, and if somebody wanted to take a look at that, do you have a link or somewhere we can go to learn more about that?
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I can send you a link.
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: I already ordered it.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: And we'll get it in the show notes.
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: Thank, you, god bless you.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: Well, that's the end of our formal interview with Dr Cheryl Shake Shaft.
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed it.
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: We're going to do a follow-up here in just a second.
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: So, if you want to hang on, tom and I are going to dissect that a little bit A couple different reasons, you know.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: We want to show that it's a very confusing time and the parents have to understand that they're going to have to be the primary educators, especially when it comes to human sexuality.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: And take this back, because, while the interview was very enlightening for Tom and I, you can see that schools I don't think, and the government doesn't have solutions for this as much as they try.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: And we really enjoyed having Dr Shakeshaft on and our total respect goes out to her.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: But we're looking for solutions, as she is too, and we're working together and you can see that.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: You know, people like Dr Shakeshaft have a genuine concern for young people and for education, and all of us can be easily confused quite a bit through this culture that we're brought up in education all kinds of different reasons, right?
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: So we're not looking for excuses, we are looking for solutions.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: So we're going to be just talking about that and remember that we have Love Ed.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: Love Ed is a program that we bring into churches and to parishes that help parents and children get this information out, and it's very, very important.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: So reach out to us.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: We'll give you some information on Love Ed and then, finally, please support us, if you can.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: All of the things that we do I mean almost everything is done by donors.
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: You know all the work that we do.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: I mean almost everything is done by donors.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: You know all the work that we do.
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: We brought more people on.
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: We're continuing to bring more staff on.
• 44:56
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• 44:59
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• 45:03
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• 45:06
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• 45:07
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• 45:09
  Speaker 1: We're trying to do it as kind of to the shoestring as we can, but we really could use your financial support.
• 45:17
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• 45:19
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• 45:21
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• 45:26
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• 45:29
  Speaker 1: So buckle up and get ready for a kind of a debriefing.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: I think you'll enjoy it.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: I'm back with Tom Hampson.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: We just had a interview with Cheryl Shake Shaft Dr Cheryl, cheryl, and it's really pronounced Cheryl C-H-A-R-O-L Shake Shaft.
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: She was a delightful guest.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: H-a-r-o-l Shake Shaft she was a delightful guest, actually Came from a different place than we do.
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: She was brought up in education a doctor, I'm sure of education, right, tom, and I read in her a bio as I was reading it.
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: I did it on purpose, I didn't leave it out.
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: She wrote in there on equity and right away.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: We know that has that educational slant, if you'll notice, in there.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: I held back a little bit myself and let Tom lead it, because he just went with the facts and kind of just calmly spoke to her and it paid off at the end.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: We were trying to make the connection because it was really on sexual abuse by teachers in schools.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: A study that she had done that said about 10% of children are sexually abused by teachers in one form or fashion in schools, which is a tremendous amount of children.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, we're trying to make the connection that the government didn't have a solution to this.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: At least I would make that stronger and stronger, and you can see from this interview that and especially at the end, that she was very appreciative.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: I think, tom, that we didn't push her in a corner and she could sense, without really stating it, that obviously that we had a different worldview on education and where it was going.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: But yet to stay with the facts, I guess don't attack people.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: I guess what I learned from this don't attack people because personally, you know, stay with the facts, get to know, you know the issues on this.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: This is a very dark time in education for American kids but I think these people so many of them they just grow up in this milieu, they're taught this.
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: She shared even her personal story about being naive as a young person and being brought into a sexual liaison at 17 years old.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: Really didn't understand what was going on and probably looks at education and funding by the government as a good thing.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: Tom doesn't realize.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: As we pushed her on or at least asked her about national sex ed standards, comprehensive sex ed standards in elementary schools, she wasn't really aware of that and I guess I bring up all these things, tom is to say that the people we talk to about these things at school board meetings and stuff, they don't all know all these issues.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: But as parents, we have to be educated ourselves on these issues.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: We have to understand that we do know the best for our kids and I think at the end, when it all comes together, we have to take sex education out of the schools, we have to bring it back to parents and to the churches, because we're not all the same and you know, equity is a socialist term and we're not all just.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: You know, we're created unique and individual and only parents really know where their kids stand and what they need.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: Tom, any kind of debriefing?
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: Well, she did acknowledge that 7%.
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: Her studies show that 9.6% of children wind up being victims of educator sexual misconduct and 7% of that 9.6% are children who are actually sexually abused.
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: They engage in some kind of physical contact, physical sexual activity, and the other 2.7% involved in grooming behavior imposed by the teacher.
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: They get in sex talk, they do sexualized kind of you know the things that lead into full-blown sexual contact.
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: It may happen after they're in school, after they get out of school, but they're groomed into a sexual lifestyle.
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: And then a recent study last year there was one that showed that it's gone up to 11.7%.
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: So there's a huge number of children.
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: When you realize that 20% of people in the United States wind up being sexually abused before they turn 17, 20% of them total, and that 10% of them are sexually abused in our schools, this is a huge problem in the schools.
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: Now, she was not willing to recognize that maybe sex education could have something to do with it.
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: She thinks that more education is the solution.
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: But you know, my observation is I think you know there's that saying that if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: And I think that's what happens with educators.
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: They think the solution to all the problems is more education, more experts, more you know, more time, more money, whatever, whatever it might be.
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: But I think our approach is that the parents need to become more involved in this and stop turning the responsibility over to the so-called experts, because they simply are not as expert as we think they are and or as they think they are.
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: I did think that Dr Shake Shaft did come to admit that she wasn't as familiar with predators as she was about the victim side of the equation, and she really didn't know that much about the National Sex Ed Standards either, other than just the basics.
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: She didn't know how they were implemented in the schools, and so we actually have a greater understanding of what is being taught in the using these sex ed standards, and I think many of the many of the experts who have looked at it from a statistical position they don't have.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because, tom, at the end, she thought that sex education was being done basically in high school and with the older kids, when, in reality, with the national sex ed standards again sometimes called the comprehensive sex ed standards this is being drilled down to elementary school, to the very youngest of the youngest, and it's really become nefarious.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: And the reason I bring that up is, she said, you know, one of the solutions is to make sure every child knows good touch, bad touch, that educators and parents could be observers and reporters to understand, to watch out for these signs of grooming that you're talking about here, and we've, you and I have gone over all those things.
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: When I asked her, I said well, I agree with you, of course, but the national sex ed standards and what we're teaching elementary schools and, to be fair again, she really wasn't that aware of these.
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: You would think she would be, but I think this is another reasonacy for Youth to develop these programs where they have their own agendas and our kids are not at the top of the priority list in helping them.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: But what the national sex ed standards do, then, is do the opposite of what Cheryl was saying, and we agree with her right.
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: I mean good touch, bad touch, observers, reporters, but the National Sex Ed standards do the opposite.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: They desensitize our kids.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: They normalize the sexual activity, a point that you make all the time.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: And so while they don't explicitly say, yeah, a 36-year-old man should go with a 15 or 16-year-old girl, they also don't say a 15-year-old boy should be sexually abusing an 11 or 12-year-old girl.
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: But when we normalize the sexual activity, this is what's bound to happen.
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: It's going to happen more and more.
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: We understand that children do need an education in our sexuality, but they need it at the same time and understand what the meaning and purpose behind our sexuality is.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, they can get into a lot of trouble, and parents need to be involved in this.
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: Well, the other thing that she's wrong about is that some of these sex ed materials do indeed talk about normalizing adult child sex.
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: Their children are being taught through some of these programs that a child has the right to engage in sexual activity whenever and with whomever they want, at whatever age, and there's a movement among these people that are the CSE crowd that says pedophiles should no longer be called that, but minor attracted people.
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: The other thing that is, there's a misnomer that a lot of people think is that while there are most of the schools still have what they call a sex ed class, most of that material is being infused in this new SEL approach to education, the social, emotional learning, so that all subjects are being taught in virtually any class.
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: So whether it is race relations or mathematics or sexuality, whatever it is, it gets infused across the board and it's being taught from a relational standpoint and really a mental health kind of approach to raising children in the schools.
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: And so it's hard to excise any particular thing out of those programs.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: Because you say, well, I don't want my kid taught this stuff.
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: Well, it's in every one of the classes.
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's taught in science class, that science through science is no longer science.
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: That you know.
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: And I'll give you just an example for people wondering how does it get into math class.
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: Well, I saw a book that said you know, here's a problem for you.
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: So it was two pictures.
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: One picture was a mom and a dad with two children and a dog and they said okay, how many people in this?
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: How many people in this picture?
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: Well, there's four, right, mom, dad and the two children, the dog, of course.
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: Of course didn't count right.
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: And then the next picture said how many people in this picture?
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: And it was two dads, two kids and a dog.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: And now we look at it and say well, it's the same thing, it's four, is it four again?
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: But here's a math problem showing two dads, two kids and the dog.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: And so in the problem itself, they're just showing kids and helping to normalize this.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: Now you do this enough times to throughout the whole curriculum and and you can see how to tom's point, how this is becoming part of our overall indoctrination really into.
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: You know, everything is perfectly normal and this gets into a very dangerous thing and what happens is parents have abdicated the responsibility to schools.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: And it gets back to my solution, tom, that at least with sex education, we have to do the best to make sure that sex education isn't being taught, but knowing that there are other ways to infuse this into your point.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: There's no way out of parents having these discussions with kids.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: They have to take it back and we have to know that the culture is a secular culture, that Christian, judeo-christian values are no longer predominant here and that your kids are going to be exposed to this one way or the other.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: There's no way around it.
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: We have to fill those children up with our worldview, our biblical worldview, and also bond with them in a way that we can have these continual discussions, sit down with them, do their homework and so that you can point these out to them and, of course, what you always say, tom, if possible, get your kids out of those schools.
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: Right, well, you know.
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: The other thing is, the ironic thing is that she, in her study, she pointed out how these uh educators that are abusing the kids groom them into a sexual activity.
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: They they engage in sex talk, they engage in in maybe showing them pornographic material or whatever it is.
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: The sex ed materials do exactly that and the books in the libraries do exactly that.
• 58:14
  Speaker 3: They even the one book that I can't remember what the name of the book was that we discussed in one of our talks was was there was a rape scene at where the you know this guy is raping this all boys are?
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: you can't back all boys aren't blue.
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: Is that the one?
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: Is that the one that was?
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: Or?
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: or yeah, I can't remember which one.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: It was started with a, c, maybe it was well anyways, not sent anyway, but it was so.
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: So there's all this material that does indeed desensitize them to improper prank maybe it was, yeah, the, the activity that she describes as being what you need to watch out for, because it's couched under a term called education or it's a comprehensive sexual education.
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: Because it's used, those terms are used.
• 59:14
  Speaker 3: She didn't see it as a potential danger, when I I actually see it as grooming by proxy so I guess that's all you know.
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: That's all I wanted to bring up.
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: You know we have to realize that a lot of the people that we're confronting, we're talking and confronting is probably the bad word for this, but in, you know, trying to discuss these things with confronting school boards, of course you have to have the confidence to go up there.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: You have to be able to realize this, but try not to attack the people themselves.
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: Anytime I'm attacked personally, whether you're correct or not in your presumption, that puts me on my heels.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: If you come out and say, hey look, it's perfectly normal.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: The way they describe any type of sexual behavior to 10-year-olds is not normal.
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: This is not normal.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: This is not normal through history, this is not normal in society.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: This is not how I view my family as saying.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: 10-year-olds should be sexualized and be taught that sex is not moral based but just pleasure based and anybody that knows.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: When our sexuality is twisted and distorted, it does not end up in a happy place.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: We end up with anxious, depressed, used kids that are going to seek abortions.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: And, of course, planned Parenthood is on the front lines of writing this and also on the front lines of making the money.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: On the other end.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: Secis is their sex education arm of Planned Parenthood and they go by a sex education for social change.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: They're trying to change the climate and the culture and they've done a pretty good job of it, tom, at this point.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: So again, the solution is not more money, more tax dollars, more state intervention.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: The solution has to be for parents who are not used to doing anything but cow towing, to dropping their kids off at school, picking them up, taking the sports, dropping them off again, and then they're on these little screens in the extra time.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: Tom, and I don't even know if kids have a dialogue with their parents in general anymore.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: I'm out all the time and I see all the parents and the kids all looking at these screens instead of talking to one another.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: And we're trying to get parents to wake up, bring this back into the home.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: We have a program called Love Ed, the John Paul II Renewal Center, that does all of this with parents, empowers parents to give the talk, empowers them to bond with kids.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: So reach out to us because we have the solution for you.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: It's a one-night presentation that you bring your kids to and we help you to lead the discussion with your child.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: It's easier than you think, tom.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: Well, one of the things that she said she mentioned that she was the reason she liked sex education was because when she was a kid they didn't teach very much about it.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: And she recounted the story about her and her boyfriend and and she said well, all of a sudden she said to him, says we're going to have to stop doing this, or pretty soon we're going to be doing it.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: And he looked at her and says well, we are doing it.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: And she didn't even know what sex was.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: And so I think that there is a role for being able to for children to understand where are the boundaries, what you should be doing and shouldn't be doing.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: But the current sex education has gone way beyond that.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, it is actually engaging in grooming children into a sexual lifestyle that is going to harm them for the rest of their life.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they need to be educated.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: Love Ed, on the other hand, doesn't do that.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: Love Ed helps build a dialogue between a parent and a child, and it has the parent more in the role of the educator than some stranger from the outside.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it does the other thing.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: It shows you your biology, how your body works, and also the meaning and purpose behind it, the theology at the same time, so that a 10-year-old can say here's how my body changes, but also here's the meaning and purpose behind it, which is marriage, family, children, bringing a family unit in.
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: This is exactly what we've talked about in the past, tom, that the modern culture, the secular culture, wants to take down, and so you're not going to find it.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: You're right, children need to be educated.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, some of these programs many, many years ago that were started in schools were to educate their children and were to help parents do this.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, it's been taken over by Marxists and socialists and it's just not working at the end of the day.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: Cheryl, a shake shaft.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: She brought the problem to light again, maybe from a secular standpoint.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: We're just connecting the dots here a little bit on the debriefing to show you and hopefully you have confidence as parents that unfortunately you're going to have to walk into the arena, thomas, right, you can't sit back anymore.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: So, hey, stick with Tom and I will continue to unpack some of these things and hopefully we give you some assistance on the way.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: Hey, god bless you.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: Thanks, tom.