Week of February 08, 2006

The following statement is from a letter entered into testimony on House Bill 1088 by the Colorado Catholic Conference. The letter is from Terry Miller, president of SESAME, a public-school abuse-victim organization. It states that despite the intent of the bill, the group can’t support it, as it doesn’t “provide equal remedies for victims of sexual abuse in a public school.”

“The Department of Justice reported, in 1998, there were 103,600 reported cases of sexual misconduct in our nation’s schools and most of them involved a teacher. In contrast; there were 10,667 reported cases of sexual abuse by clergy between 1950 and 2003” (Sex abuse of students common, by Elizabeth Cohen, Binghampton Press & Sun-Bulletin, Feb. 10, 2002). Only about 1 in 10 cases of child sexual abuse is ever reported. Additionally, “studies teach us that the typical pedophile employed in our schools makes his or her way through three different school employment settings before being stopped”(D. Pickett, Attorney at law, specializing in school law, Education World, Is the Teacher in the Classroom a Convicted Felon, 1999).