Imag­ine with me a moment – you’re a 14 year old boy. You’re awk­ward, lanky, and your voice may still be break­ing. Sud­denly one of your teach­ers starts pay­ing atten­tion to you. Lots of atten­tion to you. And she looks like the woman at the left.

Sud­denly she wants you to come over to her house. Then you have sex. Twice. Once at her house and once at school.

From the 14 year old boy’s per­spec­tive, he’s entered nirvana.

But the teacher, Debra Lafave, was 23 or 24 at the time. She should have known bet­ter. Sleep­ing with a stu­dent, who is a minor, is stu­pid. The girl prob­a­bly has prob­lems, but now, through her attor­ney, she is plead­ing “insanity”.

Insan­ity?

Accord­ing to court records, wit­nesses told inves­ti­ga­tors that Lafave’s rela­tion­ship with her teenage stu­dent grew flir­ta­tious. They kept in con­tact that summer.

Police say Lafave had sex with the stu­dent in her Riverview town house and again in the portable class­room where she taught English.

Dur­ing a trip to Ocala, the teen’s aunt saw the pair and called his mother. The teen told his mother about Lafave, and his mother called police. Lafave was arrested on June 21, 2004, after sev­eral phone calls between her and the teen were monitored.

That’s insan­ity? Stu­pid­ity, more like it. As a guy who’s about to try to get into teach­ing, why would you ever put your­self into this sort of posi­tion? Did she think this was going to turn into some Mary Kay Letourneau sort of sit­u­a­tion? This isn’t insanity.

And what prompts these peo­ple (both men and women, mind you) to sleep with stu­dents? We would hear rumors in col­lege of this stuff hap­pen­ing, but by that time the stu­dents were 18 or older. These are minors, and with it comes the pos­si­bil­ity of a statu­tory rape con­vic­tion. Put the words “teacher+sex” into Google and you’ll come up with, approx­i­mately, 6,760,000 instances of this. What’s wrong with people?