In today’s FFS news, it’s emerged that a school can be sued after two of its staff tried to catch a sexual predator ‘in the act’ by using a 14-year-old girl as ‘bait’. In 2010, the 14-year-old girl with special needs told a teacher’s aide, June Simpson, that a 16-year-old pupil kept on accosting her to ask her to go to the boys’ bathroom to have sex with him.
The boy had a history of being violent and sexually aggressive towards his classmates, but when Simpson told the school’s principal, Ronnie Blair, and suggested that the boy be put under supervision, he rejected this idea ‘and told Simpson that [the boy] could not be punished because he had not been “caught in the act” – shorthand for the school’s policy that students could not be disciplined without ‘substantiation of student-on-student misconduct’, reads a court statement as reported by Alabama news site AL.com.
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However, instead of, say, alerting police to do their own investigations, Simpson planned to ensnare the boy by trapping him, and using the unaccompanied 14-year-old as bait. Before getting the 14-year-old girl to ask the boy to have sex with her, Simpson checked it out with the school’s vice-principal, who said it was fine. Seriously – ‘Simpson and [the girl] then went to Vice-Principal (Jeanne) Dunaway's office, where Simpson told Dunaway about her plan to use [the girl] as bait to catch [the boy]. Dunaway did not respond with any advice or directive.’
What happened next is pretty horrific. ‘[The girl] left Dunaway’s office, found [the boy] in the hallway, and agreed to meet him for sex. [The boy] told [the girl] to go to the sixth grade boys’ bathroom and she complied. No teachers were in the bathroom to intervene, and [the boy] sodomized [the girl].’
The federal brief, filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (in lay terms that’s when a case isn’t initially settled properly in the mind of either party they can appeal against its ruling) read, ‘A school board cannot avoid summary judgment as a matter of law when a school administrator willfully ignores a plan to use a 14-year-old special needs student as bait to catch a student with a known history of sexual and violent misconduct, and as a result, the student is sodomized.’
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Just FYI, sodomy in Alabama means any sex that isn’t vaginal. In this case, the girl was left with anal bruising and tearing. Her and her family moved to a different state following the rape.
What did principal Blair make of it? At the time, he said, ‘It's a sad situation. At the same time, I feel very comfortable with the way the situation was handled. That’s about all I can say.’
Is that really all he can say? Because it looks like he might have to talk soon as the appeals court ruled that the case can now go to the jury. ‘A jury could easily conclude that the school acted with deliberate indifference when, despite two sexual misconduct complaints against [the boy] days before he sodomized [the girl], it provided him unsupervised access to students and failed to protect [the girl].’
Hopefully, when this school comes under fire, there’ll be some apologies made and steps taken to stop anything like this ever happening again. The worry is, the whole reason the crappy trap was set up in the first place was because the boy could only be reprimanded while ‘in the act’ of harassing or abusing someone. If the rules had started off different – making it possible for the boy to be apprehended based on eyewitness accounts of his criminal behaviour – the poor girl wouldn’t have come into harm’s way at all.
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.