SHARE
COPY LINK

SEX

Woman gets six months for sex with pupil

A teacher at a school in south-eastern Norway was sentenced on Wednesday to six months in prison after she admitted having sex with a 16-year-old pupil on a school trip.

The woman pleaded guilty last week to having abused her position when she seduced the boy in a cabin near Sarpsborg in June 2011, newspaper Sarpsborg Arbeiderblad reports.

During the trial the boy, now aged 17, told Sarpsborg district court how he felt his teacher, who was 29 at the time, had begun to fall in love with him.

The pair ended up sharing a cabin during a class trip. According to the boy, the teacher asked him if he would like to have sex with her. He said he lay awake all night thinking about the offer before giving his assent the next morning.

Afterwards, the boy said he felt let down by his teacher and had trouble sleeping.

The woman admitted to the court that she was smitten by the boy. While she said she was not sure which of them had taken most of the initiative in the cabin, she said she took full responsibility for what had happened.

“As an adult I should have stopped it, but I didn’t,” she said.

The verdict was in line with the prosecutor’s recommendation.

In addition to her jail sentence, the woman was also barred from teaching for five years and was ordered to pay the boy 35,000 kroner ($6,000) in damages.

Local authorities first reported the teacher after rumours began circulating around the school and on Facebook.

The teacher did not return to work after the 2011 summer holidays.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

SHOW COMMENTS