Grant Strickland was 14 years old when a 33-year-old teacher allegedly began grooming him with alcohol and marijuana. The relationship, authorities say, lasted two years.
Speaking to reporters after a court hearing for his alleged abuser, Nicole Callaham, the Greenville, North Carolina, teen described what it cost him.
"I had to grow up very, very fast and get onto a whole other maturity level I was never ready for and shouldn't have had to been."
According to an exclusive report by Breitbart News, Strickland is one of the few boys to speak publicly about educator sexual abuse. He met Callaham at a theatrical audition, won a part in a school play she was directing, and she began picking him up for rehearsals. What followed, he says, nearly killed him.
"I would never want someone to go through with what I went through. Because I don't think most people would be showing up to survive it. Because I almost didn't."
His story is not an outlier. According to the nation's leading researchers on the subject, educator sexual misconduct in American schools is not a series of isolated scandals. It is a systemic crisis that institutions have failed to confront, the media has trivialized, and the public has barely begun to understand.
Charol Shakeshaft, the Virginia Commonwealth University department chair and professor emeritus who authored the landmark 2004 study on educator sexual misconduct for the Department of Education, has studied this problem for four decades. That study, which examined 50 million students across nearly all of the 100,000 schools in the U.S., was updated in 2022. The update found a nearly 100 percent increase in educator rape or attempted rape since the original study was published.
Only six percent of student victims ever disclose what they experience. Six percent.
John Jay College psychologist Elizabeth L. Jeglic, described as one of the country's other leading experts on the topic, said her team updated the numbers for this decade. The finding: more than one in ten students underwent "at least one form of educator sexual misconduct" during their school years. Jeglic estimated that translates to some 500,000 U.S. students in any given year. She called the problem "rampant."
Shakeshaft put it in sharper relief when she told National Review back in 2006:
"Think the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."
The Catholic Church abuse scandal reshaped an entire institution, generated years of investigative journalism, and led to billions in settlements. The school system, by these researchers' accounts, dwarfs it. The response has been a fraction of the outrage.
A partial sampling of cases from just the past six months illustrates the scale:
These are not edge cases from obscure corners of the country. They span coast to coast, urban and rural, male and female perpetrators. The research bears out the breadth: academic teachers commit 63 percent of the abuse, coaches and gym teachers account for 20 percent, 85 percent of offenders are male, and nearly three-quarters of victims are female.
The cultural reflex when a female teacher is caught with a male student is not horror. It is something closer to a smirk. Van Halen's 1984 tune "Hot For Teacher" became a cultural touchstone, and that prurient framing has never fully left the conversation. Shakeshaft told Breitbart News that tabloid-style coverage feeds the problem.
"It feels like voyeurism. It's not like they're reporting a crime. And we minimize the danger — the harm and danger to boys — because we make it seem as if there's some kind of conquest. Like this is just some kind of gift to boys."
Strickland rejected that framing directly. "Just because I'm a man doesn't mean it should be shunned away," he said. "'Cause I was a child. I wasn't a man. I was a boy."
Jeglic's research found that female perpetrators use grooming behaviors that are "more overtly sexual, such as exposing their naked bodies and talking about sexual topics," which feeds the cultural stereotype that male victims are somehow willing participants. Male perpetrators targeting adolescent girls, by contrast, tend to use relational tactics, targeting girls who are insecure or have low self-esteem and convincing them they are in a consensual relationship.
The result for girls is delayed disclosure. As Jeglic explained:
"The majority of girls who are abused are abused in high school, and they believe at the time that they are in a consensual relationship with the perpetrator. So that delays disclosure until they're adults. And then the story is not as big when they come forward."
Both dynamics suppress reporting. Both protect perpetrators.
Shakeshaft's research uncovered another layer of the problem: the adults who see something and say nothing. Four percent of school employees who suspected educator sex abuse actively decided not to report it. That may sound small until you consider the scale of the American school system and the number of eyes that could catch warning signs.
The reasons are institutional, not mysterious. School personnel worry about passing on rumors. They value collegial relationships. They weigh whether administrators will actually act on reports. Shakeshaft noted that a key factor is whether personnel "trust" how administrators handle reports of potential misconduct. When trust is low, silence becomes the path of least resistance. "They don't want to take the chance [of reporting a colleague] because relationships in schools are pretty important to get things done."
This is not a bug. It is how institutions behave when accountability mechanisms are weak and professional loyalty outweighs child safety. Schools are no different from any other bureaucracy that closes ranks when exposure threatens the organization.
Jeglic pointed to a troubling trend in the COVID era and beyond: teacher shortages have led to hiring younger, less experienced educators, some in their early 20s, where the age gap between teacher and student narrows considerably.
"We're seeing a lot of young teachers where there's not a huge age difference between the teacher and the student. It's still an adult and a child, right? But the age difference is not as strict, and they may not be as aware of boundary violations as previous generations."
That context does not excuse the behavior. It explains how it proliferates. A 23-year-old teacher and a 17-year-old student may socialize on the same platforms and share cultural references. None of that changes the legal and moral reality: one holds institutional power over the other. The boundary exists for a reason.
Both Shakeshaft and Jeglic pointed to training as the most effective intervention available. Shakeshaft's research on bystander training found results she described as "pretty strong," particularly for school employees who witnessed warning signs but did not know how to act on them. "The people that it helped were the people who were the bystanders, who came to understand that when they see certain things happening – report that."
Jeglic's team is preparing to publish research showing that students themselves can be trained to detect grooming behaviors. "The research shows that kids can improve their grooming detection if they receive training on what grooming is and the specific behaviors," she said.
This is not complicated. Training adults to recognize predatory behavior and empowering children to identify grooming are straightforward, scalable interventions. They do not require new legislation or massive federal programs. They require schools to prioritize the safety of children over the comfort of staff.
Michigan forensic psychologist Michael Abramsky, who has evaluated some 1,000 convicted criminals for sentencing, told Breitbart News that male educators who sexually abuse students fall into one of three categories: genuine pedophiles who never developed normal psychosexual attraction, psychopaths with anti-social tendencies, and the "regressed," men who, under psychological pressure, revert to a stage of development matching their victims' age.
"I had a guy who was married with five kids. He'd never had any problems at all. But for reasons, dynamic reasons, he regressed. In these cases they go back to a time in their life in psychosexual development when they were the same age as these kids."
The American public trusts schools with its children for more waking hours than most parents get. That trust is not being repaid with vigilance. The research exists. The interventions exist. The cases keep piling up. What does not exist, at least not yet, is the institutional will to treat educator sexual misconduct as the crisis the data says it is.
Shakeshaft published her book in 2024, titled Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It. The title says everything the education establishment has spent decades trying not to hear.
Grant Strickland already said it plainly enough: he was a child, not a conquest. Half a million kids a year deserve adults who understand the difference.