Teacher asks student to write report about being raped
By Jess McCabe | 13 June 2008, 15:33
A 16-year-old girl in Utah was told to write about her own rape as a homework assignment, by a teacher, we learn from abyss2hope.
As reported in the Salt Lake Tribune:
A state commission is sending a letter of warning to a Duchesne County teacher for speaking inappropriately about a student rape victim and her family to the media.
The Utah Professional Practices Advisory Commission (UPPAC) decided Tuesday after an investigation to send a letter of warning to Tabiona School teacher Glenda Norviel. The letter comes after one of Norviel’s students, a rape victim, claimed the teacher assigned her to write an essay about her rape and pregnancy in front of the class as an alternative assignment to reading My Sister’s Keeper, a novel the student and her family found offensive.
Norviel then made remarks about the girl and her family to newspaper reporters who called her for comment. The Uintah Basin Standard quoted Norviel as saying the girl, “has supposedly been raped by the father of her baby.” Court records show a man was convicted of raping the 16-year-old girl.
Norviel also told a Tribune reporter, “The girl is not an innocent… . If she has just had a baby six weeks ago, is reading the f-word going to cause her emotional trauma for the rest of her life?”
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Anne Onne said:
What the hell? Seriously?
It's clearly a case of punishing her because she and her family objected to the other book. But whatever one thinks of people who object to something on moral grounds, how can it possibly be right to demand someone write and talk about an experience that was that traumatic? In front of her class, too! Had the teacher no sense of sympathy or common decency? Did it never occur to her that the girl might be embarrassed discussing her rape, particularly seeing as how people tend to doubt victims, or blame them for their rapes. Hurtful experiences shouldn't be pressed on anyone, and to compound someone's suffering by potentially triggering them, and deliberately asking them to think about traumatic experiences, you are deliberately causing them pain.
''Supposedly been raped'', my ass. It's not the teacher's business to pass judgement on whether her pupil wasn't or was raped. She wasn't there, was she, so how would she know? Call me a bleeding-heart liberal, but I was kind of under the impression that it's a teacher's job to support their students, and to be sympathetic when they are traumatised. If she says she's been raped, it should be good enough for you. Teachers are not the police, and if there is any chance that someone really was raped, you should give them the benefit of the doubt.
Why? Because the pain you would cause to someone who was, if you denied them and blamed them is much worse than if you gave some sympathy to someone who didn't need it. The former causes real pain, and makes it harder for the victim to heal and cope. The latter just gives a liar attention. But unless you are sure someone is a liar, why would anyone, as a feeling human, risk causing so much pain to another unneccessarily, after an already traumatic event, by assuming they are lying.
Someone like this doesn't deserve to work with people, let alone children.
I'm speechless. What kind of teacher is that? What kind of a person is that?
Posted on 13 June 2008 at 6:17 PM