He was abused by a female teacher, but he was treated like the perpetrator

By Simone Sebastian January 9 at 7:51 PM

Simone Sebastianis an assistant editor of Outlook.

Cameron Clarkson was a 16-year-old football player when he suddenly landed in the middle of a sex crime investigation at his St. Paul, Minn., 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 schools sexual harassment policy and said he bragged to fellow students about what had happened. His car was vandalized 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 girls 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 Gagnes 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 recognizes that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict her. The deal reduced her charges to a fifth-degree gross misdemeanor 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. (Gagnes 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 victimized 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.

There is a clear hierarchy in courtrooms, lawyers say. Cases involving a male teacher and a female student result in the most severe punishments and the highest damages. Los Angeles-based lawyer David Ring, whose firm Taylor & Ring represents plaintiffs in sexual abuse suits, has worked on hundreds of teacher-student cases and says its not unusual for those against male teachers to end with judgments of more than $1 million. In one example, a jury awarded $5.6million to a high school girl in a sexual abuse case involving her 40-year-old teacher. The teacher was convicted of a felony, sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay 40 percent of the civil damages to the student, who was 14 at the time of the encounters. (Chino Valley High School was ordered to pay the other 60 percent.)

But jurors and prosecutors dont have nearly the same outrage for abusive female teachers, Ring says: So what? Good for him. Thats how society looks at it. Male students, in his experience, rarely collect damages of more than $200,000. In November, Clarkson settled his case against Cretin-Durham Hall High School for $75,000. The case against Gagne settled for just $1.

Clarksons attorney, Sarah Odegaard, says her team made a strategic choice: They stood to win a larger award from the school, so they agreed to a token gesture from Gagne in lieu of a trial in which she would have denied the sexual relationship. In cases like this with an attractive, young female defendant jury bias doesnt work in favor of the victim, Odegaard says. Its not a bias we want to acknowledge, but we have to, she says. There have been some successes involving female teachers and coaches, but more often, you see lower verdicts.

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He was abused by a female teacher, but he was treated like the perpetrator