Content warning: This article contains disturbing references to sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.
A Petah Tikva English teacher was fired after admitting to raping two of her 17-year-old students, KAN News reported on Wednesday.
During her disciplinary tribunal, the teacher stated she was lonely, as her husband was serving in the IDF reserves.
The 43-year-old woman has been determined unfit to work for the Education Ministry and will be barred from any government position involving children for eight years.
The teacher invited three students over to her apartment, and she had intercourse with two of them, according to a Ynet report. Her actions with the students reportedly took place over the course of four months.
"This is a bizarre event; we never imagined something like this could happen at school. We don’t know her because she wasn’t our son's teacher, it’s just hard to believe this event is real," one of the fathers of the students told N12.
'Exceptionally severe actions'
The State Comptroller's tribunal wrote in its ruling that her action "extremely deviated from the basic professional boundaries required of a teacher in her position, let alone a teacher with such tenure and teaching experience.
"The actions began with smoking together with students on the school grounds, progressed to creating an inappropriate personal connection through social networks, and culminated in a sexual meeting at her home with minor students from the school where she teaches. These are exceptionally severe actions, which constitute a serious breach of public trust in the education system in general, and a breach of trust of the parents who entrust their children to the school’s teachers in particular."
"It was a one-time incident, which I completely regret," said the 43-year-old teacher. She pled guilty in a plea deal.
She later told Ynet, which initially published the story, that "some of the things that were published are not true" and added that she is "repentant."
Students told Channel 12 that the encounter was a joke at the school that "everyone knew about."
The prosecution said that she “was at the highest level of inappropriate behavior for a government employee - especially an employee in the education system."
An official from the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel commented on the incident.
"We must call things by their proper name – 'sexual relations' between a teacher and students is rape. In such a relationship, by nature and definition, there can be no free consent," the official said.
"It is clear to us that if the teacher were male and the students female, the public and hopefully also the institutional response would have been more severe. Denying the very harm done to male students normalizes the abuse they endure," she added.
"Even if the nature of the abuse differs between boys and girls, the lack of societal recognition of male victims exacerbates the trauma, leading to underreporting. The fact that the punishment was presented as severe, yet the teacher who committed the abuse was not even permanently removed from working with minors, is incomprehensible and reflects the ineffectiveness of the commission in dealing with abuse of boys and men," she concluded.