"What's the principal doin' with her?" Carole Pope protests in the Rough Trade classic High School Confidential.
"Young teacher, the subject of school girl fantasy," Sting starts on The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me.
Many of us adults can recall looking longingly at one or two teachers during our teen years. The sexual current running through high school hallways isn't strictly between the students.
There has been so much made about inappropriate relationships between teachers and their students over the years that it has become a cultural stereotype of sorts, something that's even joked about.
Yet when it really happens in our midst, the seriousness of an adult teacher having sex with a teenaged student is revealed.
Roderick Lyle Sauve, a former Prince George teacher was sentenced Wednesday to nine months house arrest for maintaining a sexual relationship with a student on the Duchess Park secondary school girls basketball team he coached during the 1980s.
Sauve pleaded guilty in April to gross indecency for carrying on the relationship with Sandra Stobbe (nee Boughey) from September 1981 to June 1985, when she graduated from high school, left Prince George and enrolled in a Lower Mainland college.
Stobbe, who waived her right to a court-ordered ban on publication of her name, provided a victim impact statement at the time in which she recounted the emotional, psychological and physical distress she has suffered as a result of the relationship and Sauve's efforts to keep it secret.
Stobbe also said she became pregnant at age 16 and complied with Sauve's urging to get an abortion because his wife was pregnant at the time.
The abortion reveals what is at the bottom of any relationship between a teenager and a teacher, regardless of the genders. It's all about power.
Teachers hold an incredible amount of power and authority over their students and a sexual relationship is a cruel extension of that bond. Regardless of the reasons why teachers enter into these affairs with students, they are exploiting their position to take advantage of a young person in their care.
Sauve was in his early thirties at the time of his affair with Stobbe but his age and experience are irrelevant. He betrayed a trust with a student but also with his family, his principal and his fellow teachers.
A sentence of nine months house arrest seems light but with no criminal record and no indication of other affairs, the stain on Sauve's reputation, as a man and as an educator, is the more permanent punishment.
Particularly since his victim wasn't looking for revenge.
"Whatever the legal system deems is appropriate is appropriate," Stobbe said. "I don't heal any faster or heal any more because of a longer, stiffer sentence."
Compare that with the ridiculous comment made on the Citizen website Thursday that Sauve deserves the death penalty.
Clearly, part of Stobbe's healing process has been the recognition of two key facts: she has no control over how Sauve would be legally punished and that legal punishment has absolutely no bearing on her current and future well-being.
Stobbe is also unusual in that she allowed her name to be released to the news media. As the victim of a sex crime when she was still a minor, she had the right to ask for a publication ban. The victim is often forgotten when only the name of the perpetrator is known, she said. By letting her name go public, she hopes it will strengthen the cautionary tale her story provides.
"If one person reads my story and reads my details and identifies and either stops or prevents [such a crime] or educates them about protecting their child, that's what I'm after," Stobbe said.
Stobbe is more concerned about the future and the next victim because that is a more positive and productive way of dealing with the crime committed against her than asking for Sauve's head on a plate.
Spoken like someone who refuses to see herself as a victim and refuses to let being exploited as a teenager shape the rest of her adult life.
