Dr Steven Angelides - Teacher-Pupil Sex Crime
Steven is currently working on a project on recent secondary school sex crime involving female teachers and male pupils. The project aims to read a series of criminal cases in order to rethink dominant socio-legal and cultural understandings of age, sexual subjectivity, power, consent, desire, and agency. Steven has completed three articles from this research to date:
- 'Subjectivity Under Erasure: Adolescence, Gender Equality, and Teacher-Student Sex', Journal of Men's Studies 15.3 (2007), 347-360
- Abstract: This article offers a reading of a recent Australian teacher-student sex scandal in order to interrogate the relationship between gendered subjectivity and cultural codes of gender. The questions of whether gender ought to make a difference to how we understand instances of so-called 'intergenerational sex' and whether cultural codes accurately reflect sexual subjectivity are posed. The example considered here is of the cultural narrative of the 'lucky bastard'—that is, the idea that it is a boy's fantasy made reality to have sex with an attractive teacher. In recent years this narrative has been rejected by dominant child sexual abuse discourses as a myth. This article argues that while this narrative may not capture the reality for some boys, for others it in fact speaks to their experience. It concludes with the suggestion that the failure to attend to the 'lucky bastard' narrative often results in politically motivated misreadings that substitute norms of adolescence for actual adolescent subjectivities.
- 'Sexual Offences Against "Children" and the Question of Judicial Gender Bias', Australian Feminist Studies, 23.57 (2008), 359-373.
- Abstract: This article examines the case of Victorian teacher Karen Ellis, who in 2005 was sentenced to six months prison for engaging in a consensual sexual relationship with a 15-year-old male student. She was sentenced on the basis of a gender-neutral interpretation of the offence. It is argued that Karen Ellis should not have been given a custodial sentence, and that gender differences structuring 'intergenerational' relationships complicate the judicial system's attempts to uphold a blanket principle of gender neutrality in the treatment of perpetrators and victims.
- 'Inter/Subjectivity, Power, and Teacher-Student Sex Crime', unpublished manscript.
- This article reads the case of another Victorian schoolteacher, Natalina D'Addario, who was sentenced to prison for four months for engaging in three counts of consensual oral sex with a 16-year-old pupil. It offers a critique of the model of power informing current relations of authority legislation and provides an alternative framework for analysing intersubjective power relations. The article argues that the failure to take seriously adolescent subjectivity and adolescent deployments of power produces detrimental social, psychological, and pedagogical effects.