There's a big story in the UK at the moment about a massive cover-up of 'negligence' in an NHS Trust responsible for care in the Morecombe* area. An article by Julian Patterson on NHSNetworks is the best description that I have read over the various bodies' actions in its wake. The article is here. What is so alarming is that Patterson in this and other 'blogs' does not have to twist the reality very much to lampoon the NHS, which due to all of the petty infighting, political manoeuvring, changes in political and economic philosophies, reorganisations and proposed reorganisations is in a pretty sorry mess from which it may never recover. Still, what's new? In the end, I suspect, the NHS has now grown so large and the population has such over-optimistic expectations of both the service and what can be achieved from such a 'free at the point of delivery' provision that it is in fact in some manner completely 'unfixable'. Mired as it has been for the last thirty or so years in whatever the management consultants have decided is this year's buzz word', it is probably destined to lurch from one crisis to the next as the management consultants are once again, and as they have been so many times in the past, proven wrong.
All I ask of the NHS is that when I am ill or have an accident, they do their best, with whatever resources they have, to prolong my life. If their best, whatever it may be, is not sufficient then I will die; perhaps a little sooner than I would wish but no-one lives forever. Should I die tomorrow and not in twenty or thirty years time, there will perhaps be a few people who will be sad at my passing but it is scarcely an issue about which I will have any concern once I am dead. I am not going to be looking down from heaven, or up from hell, thinking I could have done this or I could have done that or the doctors should have done this or that or the system failed me. There is no heaven and no hell from whence I could mourn my own passing; there is only an infinite night in which I will sleep and never wake. It is starting to sound good already!
Not content with the NHS, the other 'fairly big' story for the nationals to get their teeth into and perform the usual histrionic loops through hoops was over the trial of the teacher accused of abducting a, then, fifteen year old female pupil and running away with her to France! As an example of male thirty-something lunacy, it almost beggars belief in its sheer stupidity; the fact that he was caught by the French police in Boulogne, where the ferry docks, is a clear indication of where this particular teacher's brains lie.
Although this kind of event is rare in the UK, and few charges are brought for 'inappropriate behaviour' (ie sex) between teachers and pupils, whether consensual or not, it is extremely difficult to know whether the problem is indeed relatively insignificant or whether a far greater problem, than the statistics would demonstrate, lies beneath the surface of the nation's education system. According to a YouGov survey in 2007 (of 2,200 adults), they found that about 17%, one in six, claimed to know of
someone who had had an "intimate relationship" with a teacher while at
school, although how far this was based on a respondent's 'personal knowledge' and how much on schoolyard gossip and rumour is difficult to tell; I was certainly aware of one such rumour, which the rumour-mongers assured everyone was 'straight from the horse's mouth' but which was blatantly untrue, in spades!
In the past, such charges were usually only bought for consensual sex between a teacher and a pupil, whether male or female, if the pupil was under the legal age of consent, ie sixteen; obviously non-consensual sex would be dealt with under the existing rape laws. However, in 2003, the UK government amended the sexual offences act to make it a crime for any teacher to have sex with any pupil, irrespective of their age (up to eighteen), consensual or otherwise, if the teacher was employed by the same school which the pupil attended, whether or not the pupil was actually being taught by the teacher.
As a adolescent of the sixties, I grew up in the first flowering of the permissive society and tend to find restrictions on people's sexual behaviour decidedly not desirable. As a result, I initially found this extension to age eighteen in the case of pupils not really to my taste and I could see little wrong in using the legal age of consent as the benchmark. Most women that I knew were reluctant to engage in sex at age sixteen, let alone any younger. However, on reflection, this must be seen as a positive move. Teachers, like doctors, social workers, policemen, hold a semi-privileged position in western society; respect is automatically granted to them by most people by default, they are trusted not to undermine that respect and trust in any way. If such legislation is required to keep those, who to all intents and purposes are 'in loco parentis', on the 'straight and narrow', if only through fear, then so be it.
Unfortunately, if we are honest, pupils and teachers, especially the younger and more attractive ones, engage in a 'game'; not necessarily a conscious one, but a game nonetheless. Pupils, once they have attained a certain age and a semblance of maturity, wish to be treated as adults, not children. Teachers, because it is infinitely more satisfying, wish to treat those same pupils as adults. How many times did one hear, as a schoolboy or girl, the teacher exclaim in exasperation, 'if you insist on behaving like children, I shall treat you like children!' If both sides seek to engage in 'adult' relationships then sex is, at some point, whether benign or otherwise, going to rear its ugly head; in the end it is what people, adults, do, they flirt, they act the coquette, the Lothario, often without realising it. The danger, from both sides, comes when the game is not recognised for what it is, a game, and one side or the other, or both, start treating it as something else.
The teacher, being more experienced, even if they are not more mature, should have a more profound sense of responsibility, a greater sense that one, whether one likes it or not, should be in control of the situation, be in the driver's seat, and behave accordingly. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that some teachers only become teachers to wield 'power'; the ability to mould young minds in their image. Inappropriate relationships are merely one manifestation of that.
At root, I just do not get the behaviour; perhaps I am weird. When I was eighteen, I was attracted to seventeen year olds, by my mid-thirties anyone under twenty seven appealed not at all and now that I am much older, the idea of even being attracted to anyone without a commensurate degree of life experience to myself is just out of the question. Is it really just a question of a quick fuck in the back seat?
* A seaside town on the North West coast of England and from where Eric Morecombe, the comedian, acquired his stage name; he was born John Eric Bartholomew.
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