Keep This Between Us

[EdnasEdibles]

Official Description: Follow's one woman's journey as she reexamines her past relationship with a trusted teacher.

Has anyone watched this? It's a fascinating look at grooming and teacher/student affairs. They look at it from the women who experienced it and how it felt at the time versus how it felt now. Really great interviews with friends who observed and their feelings at the time. It also looks at it from a larger societal and school district view as to how the victims are frequently villainized and the teachers are protected. 

[sadie]

I really enjoyed this. I found the women interviewed to be believable, real and sympathetic. Well done.

[EdnasEdibles]

I felt the same! 

I could not get over the Spanish teacher. The first time they interviewed him he seemed "off" to me. He said a few things like how the one teacher "ruined it for the rest of them" and then it sounded like he was trying to convince the mom to deal with the teacher directly and not get the school district involved. Then the one student said he threatened her and he was like "I don't remember that" so I was utterly unsurprised when he also appeared to be a creep later on. 

[bilgistic]

I watched it and have so many questions. I don't understand how all of the sudden, the female drama teacher's (FDT) husband (Cheryl's abuser) had a job at the school, too, where he preyed on Cheryl and others. Was FDT just willingly ignorant or what? Because Cheryl moved into her and her husband's (the abuser's) basement when Cheryl went to college in Utah to be with her abuser. I feel like something was left out there. Was FDT enabling her husband or was she participating in the abuse? It all seemed really unclear. I know she eventually left him.

And yeah, Spanish teacher pinged my radar as soon as he showed up. There were so many inappropriate pictures with him and the other teacher touching the kids. I mean they always had their arms around the kids and were hugging them, etc.

I student taught in 1997. I didn't end up teaching, but finished my training. I distinctly remember being told by my professors that we needed to maintain professionalism at all times around our students, especially those of us who were training to be secondary education teachers. We were only four years older than some of our students. I remember our profs saying that we shouldn't touch the kids except for maybe a pat on the arm. For me to have that clear a memory and then seeing the pictures of those teachers hanging all over these kids, sometimes in swimsuits(!!!), I knew they were way over the line.

[hiisa]

What absolutely killed me about this was that gross Spanish teacher saying --repeatedly-- that they didn't know "the rules". I feel like if you need it explicitly stated that it's a rule to not f*ck your students then maybe you have no business being a teacher. 

Heaven absolutely broke my heart. Especially when she said that she didn't know where she stood with some of her immediate family because of the trial.  I found her and Allison Wood to be so incredibly articulate about their abuse. But I think they had confronted it in a way that the doc maker (who's name I've forgotten) hadn't since Allison wrote her memoir and Heaven had to testify. 

Cheryl, that was her name. I also felt really badly for her. It seemed like she KNEW that her experience was abuse but that it really clicked that she wasn't "special" when she read Utah's emails from the teacher and they were basically the same. And again when the Spanish teacher who she seemed to have considered a friend --even while acknowledging he played a part in her grooming-- was brought down as a predator. 

Passing the trash is horrifying and something needs to be done to stop that practice.