There has long been a debate as to whether or not female teachers having sex with male students should receive the same penalty as male teachers who have sex with female students.
Up until about 20 years ago, you almost never heard about female teachers being arrested for having sex with male students. I'm sure it happened, but it probably wasn't taken seriously or pursued by law enforcement unless the boy was very young.
However, in the past 2 decades, we've seen numerous stories of female teachers arrested and charged for having sexual relationships with male teen students in their class. In most cases they tend to be white women under 35, and usually married. Which is weird. Actually the whole thing is weird.
Anyway, the case of 30-year-old Heather Hare is getting attention in the media because of her unusually harsh sentence.
Heather Hare taught high school in Arkansas. She met a 17-year-old boy in one of the classes she taught, gave him "one-on-one counseling sessions", and you can imagine where it went from there. The two of them had sex numerous times, estimated to be about 20-30, during the 2021-22 school year.
Unfortunately for Hare, she also had sex with the boy during a class trip to Washington DC, which got the feds involved, since it became a matter of crossing state lines to do so. Had she confined the sex to Arkansas, only local authorities would have dealt with it, and she would have likely received a lighter sentence.
Here's an article about her guilty plea from a local station in Arkansas:
https://katv.com/news/nation-world/f...room-education
Here's the press release from the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edar/pr...transportation
Because this is a federal offense, she will have to serve most of her sentence.
The question is... was this sentence too harsh?
My opinion is YES, it was far too harsh.
There are various reasons for this:
1) The age of consent in Arkansas is 16! The only reason this was illegal was because he was a student of hers, causing the age of consent to be 18 in such a situation.
2) As of the early 2010s, the CDC reported that the average age for male loss of virginity was 17.0 years. While it's true that there was a substantial age (30/17) and status (teacher/student) difference here, you can't really make the case that this was "rape", nor that the experience was likely to have traumatized the boy.
3) There is zero chance that any form of physical coercion occurred, as can happen when it's an adult male with a teen female. Some teen females have reported to have consented to sex with adult males because they were afraid of what would happen if they said no. Clearly this boy was not scared of physical consequences of saying no, and there's no indication that he was doing this out of fear of any other consequence.
I do think the teacher should get some jail time because she had sex with a student. But it shouldn't be 13 years. If she had sex with a random 17-year-old she met on the street, it would have been legal!
Opinions?