By John Vibes

In recent years, Catholic priests have earned a nasty reputation for sexually assaulting minors, and rightfully so, there is a disturbing trend towards sexual abuse within the clergy.

However, according to a long-ignored study, public schools are actually a far more dangerous environment for children, where students are 100 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than they would in a church.

This point is not made to take attention away from the very real problem of sexual abuse in churches, but is intended to highlight how the same problem exists to an even greater degree in public schools and is swept under the rug.

In 2002, the Department of Education was ordered to conduct a study of sexual abuse in the school system, as a part of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.

Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft led the study, and found that sexual abuse was rampant in American public schools.

“[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,” Shakeshaft said in an interview after the study was published.

According to the 2004 study, “the most accurate data available at this time indicates that nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career. Educator sexual misconduct is woefully under-studied. We have scant data on incidence and even less on descriptions of predators and targets. There are many questions that call for answers.”

It is a sad fact that sexual predators will be drawn to professions where they work with children, and it is also a sad fact that government agents are typically protected by their organizations when they commit crimes. With that being the case, when a government agent is also a sexual predator, they are many times able to prey on innocent children without ever getting caught.

Shakeshaft also said in the study that, “To get a sense of the extent of the number of students who have been targets of educator sexual misconduct, I applied the percent of students who report experiencing educator sexual misconduct to the population of all K-12 students. Based on the assumption that the AAUW surveys accurately represent the experiences of all K-12 students, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade.”

The government in any country is not concerned with the health and well-being of children, and they do not spend billions on education for the good of the children or the parents. They invest so much in schools, and care so much about them, because they want to be able to train children to be obedient citizens and indoctrinate them into the system of control that they are living under.