As the age of enlightenment on the seriousness of sexual abuse dawns, Americans are seeing more and more powerful men in both entertainment and politics held publicly accountable, but sometimes the perpetrator is not a powerful man … and the victim is not always a woman.

It was only two years ago that Saturday Night Live (SNL) made fun of the trial where a female teacher was accused of sexually abusing a male student.

The SNL dialogue would definitely not be taken as lightly today as it was back then.

“When your classmates became aware of your relationship with Ms. Luna, what happened at school?” an attorney in an SNL skit asked a student, who – along with his classmates – acted as though being a male victim of statutory rape was commendable. “I just remember giving thousands of high-fives!”

However, research consistently finds that about one in six boys are victimized before the age of 18, and increasingly, it may be at the hands of a female teacher. In fact, a third of school sexual abuse events are perpetrated by women.

The trauma affects the boys in much the same way it affects girls – fear, anxiety, depression, withdrawal and more.

Despite these sobering findings, former Department of Education Chief of Staff Terry Abbot asserts that the crime is often downplayed.

“Certainly, there are plenty of people in the community who don't take as serious a view as they should when we have a female teacher who sexually abuses a male student,” Abbot pointed out.

He says that fortunately, the justice system is finally catching up.

“Judging from what's been happening – especially of late in the courts with some very strong prison sentences for female teachers who are charged with sexually abusing boys – I think that the attitude is certainly turning,” Abbot observed.

The reason why America is seeing more of these awful betrayals of trust is not surprising to the education expert.

“The major contributor to the explosive growth in the number of sexual relationship cases is social media and text messaging – secret messaging between teachers and students that leads very, very rapidly in these cases to sexual relationships with students,” Abbot maintained.

He also stressed that female teachers were more likely than the male teachers to use social media to lure a child into a relationship.

“If we can remove the secrecy – if we can put it out into the light and make sure that a teacher can't correspond with a child by social media or text message privately – then we can do a whole lot to stop this from happening,” Abbott concluded