Abused by female teacher, treated like the perpetrator

Washington Post/Marvin Joseph

There are people who believe that I cannot possibly be a victim of abuse, says Cameron Clarkson, now 22.

Cameron Clarkson was a 16-year-old football player when he suddenly landed in the middle of a sex crime investigation at his Minnesota, US, high school.

Lawyers grilled him on the details of his sexual history. School officials, in a statement to the press, cited him for not invoking the school's sexual harassment policy and said he "bragged to fellow students about what had happened."

His car was vandalised with red-dyed tampons and smeared with peanut butter, to which he is fatally allergic, by an unknown assailant. The shape of a penis was burned into his front lawn with bleach.

"People kept reminding me that I ruined that poor girl's life," Clarkson says.

The "poor girl" was a teacher at his school. Gail Gagne, a 25-year-old basketball and lacrosse coach, was a full-time substitute teacher at Cretin-Derham Hall High School and a couple of months away from becoming a regular physical education instructor. One day, she offered to give Clarkson a ride home after he left the school gym, leading to what he describes as the first of a series of sexual encounters between them in 2008 in Gagne's car, in their homes, in hotels. He says their relationship ended two months later; another student told school officials about it the next spring.

Gagne was fired and charged with two felony counts of criminal sexual conduct with a student. But in the investigations that followed, Clarkson was treated more like the perpetrator than the victim. Gagne, meanwhile, faced an easier path in some ways. She denied any sexual contact with Clarkson but entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant does not admit guilt but recognises that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict her. The deal reduced her charges to a fifth-degree gross misdemeanour with a one-year sentence, which was suspended a far lighter punishment than the possible four-year prison sentence for the felony charges she faced. (Gagne's lawyer still says there was no sexual contact.)

For male victims of sexual abuse, this is how it goes. Growing evidence shows that boys who are sexually preyed upon by older female authority figures suffer psychologically in much the same way that girls do when victimised by older men. But in schools, courts and law offices, male victims are treated openly with a double standard, according to interviews with a dozen experts in law, psychology and social work.

Some say boys should get the same protective care that girls do; other people who work with these cases argue that male teens are driven by raging hormones and are only too happy to explore their new sexuality with older women. But all of the experts agree that the discrepancy in the treatment of victims of nonviolent sexual abuse by their high school teachers is real. And it shows: Male victims typically receive lower awards in civil cases, the experts say, and female perpetrators get lighter sentences.

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Abused by female teacher, treated like the perpetrator