Former Middle School Teacher Receives 2-Month Sentence for 3 Years of Sexually Abusing a Student
On this fine Thursday afternoon, I bring you some bleak shit coming out of Texas: On August 2, former Houston-area middle school teacher Marka Bodine was convicted of continuous abuse of a child, after pleading guilty. The child in question was Bodine’s former student, with whom she had a sexual relationship from the time he was 13 until he was 16 years old. After Bodine’s divorce, she apparently even moved into the same apartment complex as the student. Police were tipped off to the inappropriate relationship after Bodine told her higher-ups that the student was harassing her. One phone investigation and dozens of sexually explicit pictures later, and Bodine had a lot of explaining to do.
Somehow, Bodine was only sentenced to 60 days in prison, in addition to 10 years of probation and life on the sex offender registry. Given the nature of the crime, the two-month sentence should raise some eyebrows—hell, I’ve been grounded for longer. And while we’re not in the business of wishing 40 years of prison on anyone (which was the prosecutors’ original proposal), we are in the business of questioning why sentencing is so relatively lenient on female sexual predators—especially in a time where conservatives seem to be so concerned with the sexual safety of children in schools and continue to pin grooming accusations on the LGBTQ+ community.
Though her sentence is especially light, Bodine is far from the first female teacher to get off with little more than a slap on the wrist for sexual offenses with students. In Florida, the prosecution once dropped charges for lewd and lascivious battery for Debra Lafave, a teacher who had sex with her 14-year-old student, after her lawyer successfully convinced the judge that their client was “too pretty for prison.” We’re not sure that those are appropriate grounds, your honor. And just last year, a Pennsylvania middle school teacher was sentenced to “at least five years” in state prison for sexually assaulting her 13-year-old male student.
Now let’s take a look at the men doing similar crimes: A Florida technology teacher received a 40-year sentence, while a North Carolina teacher is slated to serve 50 years for his crimes—that’s half of a century. While our criminal justice system is notoriously unjust and inconsistent, we can also probably chalk this particular gender disparity up to public perception: As a society, we’ve been programmed to think that only men can be sexual predators, despite women making up around five percent of sex offenders and 30 percent of teacher/student misconduct cases, according to Leo Weekly.
https://jezebel.com/former-middle-school-teacher-receives-2-month-sentence-1849371788
WTAF? You know damn well if she'd been a man.....
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