Female teachers punished

"I think we as a society have, for years and years, said, 'A boy is a boy, and a boy does what a boy does.' We pat them on the back, we want them to be out there doing things as men. Our daughters we want to be treated as vulnerable and innocent."

However, Searle said he has seen a slow change in this attitude toward boys and a greater inclination on the part of young male students to speak up, although they often pay a price for doing so in the form of ridicule from classmates.

"I think we're being more open in society to the fact that juvenile males can be victims also," he said.

Increased media coverage also has heightened public awareness of sexual mistreatment of students, he said.

Julie Bradshaw, director of Primary Children's Medical Center's Center for Safe and Healthy Families, said boys who are raped are emotionally damaged, just like girls who are raped, and that is compounded by society's overall lack of acceptance for the male victim.

"What's important in any sexual relationship, even with grown-ups, is that the power differentials are equal. When you have a grown-up and a child — and a teenager is a child — you can never have equal power differentials, and that's the problem," Bradshaw said.

Minor males, simply because of their youth, do not have the ability to truly consent.

"These romanticized notions of being broken into the sexual world by the kind and caring older woman are just wrong because it doesn't work that way," Bradshaw said. "Most of these women have severe psychological problems, or they wouldn't be attracted to young boys."

Bradshaw said the sexual abuse of a boy or girl can produce depression, possibly even of a suicidal nature, as well as post traumatic stress syndrome, anxiety and other issues. It also can have ill effects on their ability to engage in a trusting relationship later in life.

The key is how people treat the sexual-abuse victim after the incident, said Bradshaw, adding that she strongly recommends professional counseling.

Perhaps the most widely publicized teacher-student situation was the notorious case of former Washington teacher Mary Kay Letourneau. Married and the mother of four, Letourneau, at age 34, began engaging in sex in 1996 with Vili Fualaau, when he was 13.

She was sentenced to prison for rape, had two children by Fualaau while he was a juvenile, and ended up marrying him in highly publicized nuptials bankrolled by "Entertainment Tonight."

Teacher-student liaisons have become fodder for Hollywood

Letourneau's case became a television movie. On Friday, the big-screen film "Notes on a Scandal," about a female teacher having an affair with a male student, opened in Salt Lake City.

'One is too many'