Time Magazine has a burning question: What's up with all the horny female teachers in Florida? The publication ran a story a couple days ago, inspired by Maria Guzman Hernandez. You know, the 32-year-old Hialeah teacher who was arrested for allegedly seducing a 15-year-old boy last week.
We're guessing writers at Time rented The Reader over the weekend, then flipped the plot a bit. Because the article sounds like a Hollywood movie. It boils down to this: Hernandez belongs to a sultry club of distraught Floridian lady educators who are down with pubescent boys.
The article begins:
"If you're the parent of a teenage boy in Florida, you probably muttered "Not again" while reading your morning newspaper this week. There on the front page was yet another case of an adult female teacher being arrested for admitting to having had sex with an underage male student. This time the alleged perp was Maria Guzman Hernandez, a 32-year-old instructor at the private Our Lady of Charity school in Hialeah; her victim was 15. But she just as well could have been the 34-year-old Jacksonville public-school science teacher arrested last month for allegedly having sex with a 14-year-old student, once in her SUV; the 32-year-old St. Petersburg teacher collared in March for allegedly "sexting" nude pictures of herself to an eighth-grade boy; or the 45-year-old teacher at a private Christian academy in South Daytona who was arrested days before for allegedly having sex with a boy from her class in various Daytona Beach hotels."
It continues:
"The crime appears to be getting more cavalier in the Sunshine State... parents and prosecutors alike are asking themselves why the female version of pedagogue perversion seems more common on their peninsula compared with other places."
To answer the question, they turn to Hillsborough County State Attorney Michael Sinacore for some analysis:
"One theory for the growing number of cases like these, says Sinacore, is what he calls "the more relaxed if not blurred boundary lines between teachers and students as teachers try to communicate with kids in this day and age." Today's kids, as the media have reported recently, are far less shy about innocent physical contact like hugging than their parents were as teens. That can be exploited by any male pervert overseeing a classroom. But it can also embolden predatory female teachers, whom experts say are often in emotionally needy states. "The trend with female offenders, more than males, is that they have emotional turmoil going on in their lives," says Sinacore.
Congratulations,Florida.
