Saturday, June 10, 2000
A travesty of trust betrayed
Some people have to learn things the hard way. Even teachers.
Former Kings Junior High teacher Lisa Karabinus was “terribly sorry” for the damage she did when she had sex with a 13-year-old student, she told a Warren Country courtroom Monday. She cried. She looked awfully sorry.
But sometimes, as was probably true in her own classroom, sorry isn't enough.
She will spend at least the next six months, and perhaps the next four years, in prison.
Having sex with your student is a crime of stupidity and of selfishness. It damages one of the purest relationships on earth, and spreads its stain far beyond the immediate participants.
Having sex with a student is predatory behavior of the worst sort.
A teacher is invited freely into the life of a child. Parents send children off to school pointedly hoping that they will trust their teacher, confide in her, be open with her.
There are already enough places for parents to fear for their children's emotional safety. School should never be one of them.
Yet this is the relationship Lisa Karabinus took advantage of, the level of trust she flagrantly betrayed, the depth of damage she did.
That her victim was male, not female, and 13 years old, not 5 or 7, may strike some people as more understandable, if not acceptable. But the junior high years are a terrible time to victimize a child with a crime of this sort.
Early adolescents are fighting a ferocious battle to separate from their parents. When they find a teacher they like, they form an attachment of the deepest and most emotional kind. They can tell you what her shoes look like, name her favorite food, itemize the color, make and year of her automobile.
They tend to hang around her classroom like a kitten at the door on a chilly day. They give her cards and little gifts for holidays. They drop her notes, and bring her treats. And when, as sometimes happens, they develop a “crush,” they wear it written across their face.
This is where the good teacher draws boundaries. It happens 99 percent of the time. She limits the out-of-class time she spends with the child, makes sure other people are present when the two have contact, emphasizes the proper nature of their relationship and sometimes directly but gently spells out how the student's thinking has gone astray, and why it is wrong.
That there is a tiny minority of other teachers who entertain and initiate a sexual relationship is a travesty to the whole profession. Where most teachers give, these teachers take. In milder cases, we see the same selfish instinct in the teacher who wants to be “popular” so badly that he trashes rules, shares confidential information and ridicules staff members with his students. We see it in the coach who, to improve his own record or his employability, verbally blisters struggling players, teaches dirty tricks, physically overextends his team. When it is full-blown into an arrogance that sees children as targets for the adult's sexual appetites, it turns into one of the most damaging ways to abuse a child.
May teachers who love children keep entering the profession.
May Lisa Karabinus never work with children again. May the boy she victimized heal. May we all see children as people we shelter and serve, not selfishly use and arrogantly sacrifice.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati, OH 45202, or fax at 768-8340. E-mail her at krista_ramsey@hotmail.com.
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