It’s pretty likely they were working illegally/off the books, as it sounds like they were not in the country legally and therefore would not have been able to obtain the necessary “working papers” teens need to apply for jobs.

She sounds like my mum: her kids at school are her kids, dammit. I love the thought of that woman being told off in the “teacher voice”.

Um, yeah, this story in no way, shape, or form is what normal Korean or Korean-American childhood is like. This story is not “how it is in Korean culture.”

It’s relevant because there is a pretty common pattern of exploitation of migrants where they are kept indentured/enslaved by a combination of inflated or completely fabricated debts related to their migration and continued boarding, and they are kept entrapped through withholding their legal documents. This shit…

I had a similar thought, but then it occurred to me that calling the kids Korean might be to describe their nationality rather than their ethnicity, i.e. to try to highlight that they had been, essentially, trafficked internationally by this woman.

Apparently turning a 9 and an 11 year old into slaves will get you less years in jail than smoking marijuana

Okay, first: Kudos to the teacher who didn’t attribute the child’s exhaustion to laziness or disrespect. I know that should be a given, but many signs of abuse and neglect are blamed on the child.

Seriously I reiterate, seven years? This kind of shit goes on a lot more often than Americans are willing to admit. And, it continues because human trafficking is a low risk/high reward crime. Among all the evils humans have concocted for one another, this type is damn near the worst.

That's one badass assistant principal.

Jesus. If we refuse they just keep on. It’s unlikely any court or jury would say this was rape, but it was. Edited to say: I hope “Dave” reads this and realizes a bunch of women think he’s a rapist asshole. Not that he cares what we think or he’d respect what we say and want.

I know that my opinion is quite possibly neither welcome nor warranted, as a man, but if I was with a girl and she was responding like that, I would very much feel like was a rapist and an utterly deplorable piece of shit for even taking the conversation in that direction, never mind the actual ACT.

I had an experience in that same ‘gray’ area and it wasn’t until I told my male friend, years later, and he was like yeah, that’s rape (he also contends that almost all men have raped a woman, b/c of gray areas like these). But I could never say that “I was raped” because - yeah, it seems so tame compared to a lot…

Saying this as a man, at any point if anyone even has to ask the question “was that/ or was I raped?” The answer is yes. You didn’t say yes, consent is never implied. Girls/guys laugh sometimes when I ask but I think it’s something everyone should do.

Rape is sex in the absence of consent, so you do not have to say no, its rape if you don't say yes. Some state laws, however, say there must be force used, but others do not, in NJ it would definitely be rape because no force or threat of force is required here.

Such an interesting, thoughtful piece. I applaud you for putting this out there.

If he had anything like a functioning moral center and/or empathy for other human beings, the moment she said she wasn’t attracted to him in such concrete terms would’ve been the end of his own desire to have sex with her. For a normal guy, that’s an instant libido crusher. You have to have something seriously wrong…

As I understand your description of events, it sounds like it most likely was. You said “no” (repeatedly, not that the number of times matters), and he did it anyway. I thought that we’d done away with the idea that it’s not rape unless you’re kicking and screaming.

That’s a great chart. So it seems that the issue with the scenario she describes above turns on the answer to this particular question:

“You already said that, give me another reason.” Guess what, fuckhead? I don’t fucking want to and I don’t have to explain myself. Daves of the world: you are not owed sex simply for existing, and no one EVER has to give you EVEN ONE reason why they don’t want to have sex with you. Last month, I got a Facebook friend…

Her behaviour presumably was extremely different because in those other situations she likely communicated consent in non-verbal ways: kissing back, reciprocating sexual touch, undressing herself, undressing him etc. During the wanted sex, she (presumably) didn’t freeze and remain silent and non-responsive while those…