Karen Ellis - Double Standards
May 5, 2005
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SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian female teacher was jailed for six months Thursday for having sex with a teenage student, with a warning from the judge that future offenders could not expect such "lenient" treatment.
Karen Louise Ellis, a 37-year-old physical education teacher, had earlier received a suspended sentence of 22 months after she pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual penetration with a boy aged under 16.
But the Supreme Court of Victoria's Court of Appeal in Melbourne upheld an appeal by prosecutors against the leniency of that sentence, saying that mother-of-three Ellis should have been sentenced to two years' jail on each of the counts.
Justice Frank Callaway instead imposed a new sentence of two years and eight months. He sent Ellis to jail for six months and suspended the balance of the new sentence for three years
"This was not a foolish lapse on one occasion that was not repeated. There were six counts and two distinct periods of offending," Callaway said in a written judgment.
He said that "a like offender in the future could not expect the same leniency.
"Men and women are to be treated on their merits and not according to their sex and ...
the law is concerned to protect all children from abuse, especially from those in a position of power, authority or trust," Callaway said.
Local media reported that Ellis burst into tears as she was led from the court.
"She's pretty devastated, we're all devastated," Ellis's lawyer Chester Metcalfe told reporters outside the court. "She's taking it pretty hard at the moment, as you can expect."
The original trial had heard that Ellis, then 36, began seeing the boy, identified only as Benjamin, in late 2003.
She first had sex with him in her suburban Melbourne home on Oct. 10 of that year, after which she drove Benjamin, then 15, to a nearby railway station.
A similar pattern was repeated another five times in October and November of that year until the boy's mother saw him getting out of Ellis' car on Nov. 23 and became suspicious.
The court heard the boy had failed school that year and had since become estranged from his family.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/13/1100227628626.html
Double standards rife when children are sexually abused
By Miranda Devine
November 14, 2004
The Sun-Herald
Teacher Karen Ellis looked pretty pleased with herself last week, walking free from a Melbourne court with her long-suffering husband after being convicted of having sex with her 15-year-old student.
The 37-year-old mother of three was given a 22-month suspended sentence after pleading guilty to six counts of sexual penetration with a child under 16. During her relationship last year with her year 10 student, she bombarded him with about 500 text messages, drove him to her house after school or had him skip school to have sex, after which she would buy him McDonald's.
Public reaction has ranged from, "nudge nudge, wink wink, lucky boy" to disgust. The boy, now 16, does not regard himself as a victim, even showing up in court to support his former physical education teacher.
He tendered a victim's impact statement to the court: "I am very capable of making my own decisions and I'm very mature for my age." Victorian County Court Judge, John Smallwood, thought Ellis did not deserve to go to jail, as male teachers have, because of "mitigating" factors, such as the boy's consent.
"The victim, in the legal sense, is saying 'I'm not victim at all; if anyone's a victim, it's her'," the judge said during the trial.
"Consent is not a defence to guilt but it has to be a mitigating factor, doesn't it?" he said.
To which prosecutor Kieran Gilligan replied: "If there wasn't consent it would be a rape charge, it wouldn't be a sexual penetration charge."
Precisely.
Most child abuse experts say what complicates prosecutions is that the victim often doesn't recognise the abuse until years later, if at all, mistaking it for love.
His mother knows better, since she reported the abuse to authorities, after seeing her son outside school acting "like husband and wife" with his teacher.
Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Melbourne's respected adolescent psychologist, was worried enough about Ellis's lenient sentence to warn: "Just because a 15-year-old looks 20 doesn't mean he has the cognitive capacity of an adult. Perhaps all members of the judiciary need a crash course in the new developmental psychology of adolescence, which clearly indicates that the human brain is only fully formed in the early 20s."
Society has always drawn a sharp line against child sexual abuse. The law requires more restraint of teachers and those in authority over children. How, otherwise, can parents trust their children are safe at school?
But if we try to blur the line or redefine childhood downwards, where does it end?
Last week news came from the US of a 29-year-old woman charged with the sexual assault of an eight-year-old boy. Yes, eight. He was a friend of her seven-year-old daughter. She would buy him toys and McDonald's food and take him home for sex. Comparisons were drawn last week between Ellis's slap on the wrist and the three-year jail sentence given to Melbourne tennis coach Gavin Hopper for a similar offence with a 14-year-old female student.
Judge Smallwood warned the court that such comparisons were "very dangerous".
Why? Boys are just as vulnerable to abuse as girls. No adult should be having a sexual relationship with a child, no matter how "mature" or "willing" the child might appear. Those defending Ellis's lenient sentence keep talking about mitigating factors, the boy's maturity, his consent.
But many of the same people cut no such slack to former governor-general Peter Hollingworth when he tried to use consent as a mitigating factor in a case of a minister sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl.
"There was no suggestion of rape or anything like that, quite the contrary. My information is rather that it was the other way round." Archbishop Hollingworth told ABC-TV in 2002, prompting the storm of condemnation that drove him from office.
Quite rightly, he was condemned for using a victim's apparent compliance as an excuse. The whole point of child sexual abuse is that the abuser has power over the victim, whether through love or age or a position of authority, so coercion is not needed.
As for Karen Ellis's victim, he didn't finish school, is now estranged from his single mother and living with his grandparents. That would appear to be a negative impact, in anyone's eyes, not least his poor mother's.