Why female teachers sexually abuse students

2 days ago 5

Female teachers who sexually abuse their students are seeking intimacy, emotional connection and to form a relationship, not just sexual gratification, says the state’s top child abuse investigator.

Women make up a small but statistically significant portion of child sexual abusers – about one in 100 or one in 200, according to child abuse squad commander Detective Superintendent Linda Howlett.

Teachers Monica Young (top left), Helga Lam (top right), Ella Clements (bottom left), Gaye Grant (bottom right) have been accused of sexually abusing their students.

“Female sexual offending in regards to students we don’t see a great deal. The ones I have seen and we’ve arrested, they seem to want to form a relationship,” she said.

Research shows while most child sex offending takes place within families, “we know a lot does take place in institutions,” the University of Sydney’s Professor Rita Shackel, who researches children’s access to justice, said.

Female sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone with “usually quite a close relationship with the child, or someone well known to them, like a teacher or family member,” Shackel added.

Tayla Brailey is facing charges over child sexual abuse.

Last week, St Augustine’s Brookvale drama teacher Ella Clements was charged over her alleged sexual abuse of a 15-year-old student which was discovered by the boy’s father when he saw inappropriate texts on the child’s mobile phone.

She remains on bail and will return to court next month.

Also before the courts is married PE teacher Tayla Brailey, who was last year charged with sexually abusing two male students, aged 16 and 17.

Brailey and Clements follow in the ignominious footsteps of a range of Sydney teachers who have come before the courts for sexually abusing male students. Western Sydney teacher Monica Young was jailed in 2021 for raping a 14-year-old boy two months into her first teaching job at 23. Former teacher Helga Lam was accused of sexually abusing four boys aged as young as 13 in the late 1970s, but has always maintained her innocence. Her child abuse trial collapsed in 2024 when the Court of Criminal appeal ruled the law at the time of the alleged abuse only applied to men.

Former teacher Gaye Grant was jailed in 2022 after pleading guilty to maintaining a years-long “unlawful sexual relationship” with a primary school student in the Illawarra in the 1970s. She was released from prison last year after she was acquitted on the same grounds as Lam.

Howlett thinks the real number of female sexual offenders could be higher because male victims of female perpetrators are less likely to report abuse.

“It’s a bit of a shame factor,” she said.

“People seem to think it’s a bit salacious, rather than child abuse. When it’s turned the other side and it’s a female offender, a lot of people don’t see it as an offence,” she said.

NSW Police child abuse squad Commander Detective Superintendent Linda Howlett.

While boys remain resistant to reporting to police, “we’d encourage any victims whatsoever to come forward to report,” Howlett said.

Changes in the way we think about sexual abuse may have led to more reporting, Shackel said.

“The Royal Commission [into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse] really had a big impact in terms of community education,” she said.

“It might be recorded more, there might be more of a tendency by the criminal justice system to prosecute those reports. If you prosecute more cases you’re going to get more convictions, but really, we don’t know if we’re seeing more [female sexual abuse of children] or more disclosures,” she said.

Open conversations with children, including male children, checking children’s devices and their settings and knowing where your child is going, what they are doing and who they are with are all key steps parents can take to mitigate the risk of sexual abuse, said Howlett.

Any suspicions should immediately be reported to police and not the institution, which puts its own interests first, Howlett said.

“Do not report to the school or childcare educators, who may want to protect the integrity of their schools.”

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