It's the Media That's Hot for Teacher

April 4, 2007 — -- The headlines are sexy and the stories salacious. But is the spate of recent media reports about female teachers having sex with their students an honest reflection of the truth or just so much media hype?

In the most recent case to make headlines, Lina Sinha, 40, headmistress of a Montessori school in New York City, was convicted last week of sodomizing a former student when he was 13. She was also found guilty of trying to bribe another boy in an effort to get him to lie about their relationship, and now faces up to 18 years in prison.

About 10 percent of all children -- boys and girls, in kindergarten through 11th grade -- have reported receiving some sort of sexual harassment by an adult while in school. About 7 percent of those cases involved physical abuse, said Charol Shakeshaft, an education professor at Hofstra University and author of a congressionally mandated study on teacher misconduct for the Department of Education.

Experts say that while reports of teacher sexual misconduct are rising, it is difficult to know if there has been an increase in the number of actual occurrences of sexual abuse by teachers, because no previous studies were ever conducted to give scientists a baseline for comparison.

What is certain, however, is that the vast majority of teachers who harass or abuse their students are men. Men make up just 15 percent of all teachers, yet are responsible for two-thirds of all abuse.

Moreover, despite the public's fascination with female abusers and our perception that the media is flooded with stories of their seductions, the abusive teachers highlighted in the media are also overwhelmingly male.

"In 2006, 158 different cases were reported nationwide in newspapers," Shakeshaft told ABC News. "Of those, 21 percent were about females and 78 percent about males.

"The [number of press] stories are similar to the number of actual incidences. … [Stories about] females are slightly overreported in the proportion that they exist," she said. "Females aren't actually being reported on more in the media … just one out of five stories is about females."