Illinois Teacher Arrested for Grooming, Sharing Explicit Content with Student

Law enforcement arrested a 27-year-old Illinois high school teacher Wednesday on charges of grooming and sharing harmful materials with a minor.

Law enforcement filed a report on Wednesday from the Westville, Illinois, police department, claiming that Kaylee Broadway, a high school teacher, sent nude photos of herself to a student via a social media platform.

The police requested that the Vermillion County Sheriff’s Department lead the investigation into the matter. Investigators conducted interviews and obtained search warrants for the social media platform and several electronic devices, which revealed explicit content that reportedly supported the allegations against Broadway.

Broadway was arraigned at the Vermillion County Courthouse and is on pre-trial release.

Fox Illinois wrote:

Psychologist Elizabeth Jeglic tells us that while overall child sexual abuse cases have decreased across the country, there’s been an increase in cases happening within schools, places that are supposed to be safe for children.

She says that now, schools are potentially one of the more dangerous places for kids.

“Our research has shown that about 11% of kids experience some kind of educator sexual misconduct, which is a boundary violation by a teacher, and about 1% will experience contact sexual abuse. So when you extrapolate that to the population of the U.S., that’s 500,000 kids,” Jeglic explained, according to the Fox report.

Jeglic told Fox that 14 percent of these predators are women.

“And so we have to be aware that males can be victimized as well, and even if they don’t believe that they are victims at the time, we know that from the research, there are long-term harms to them,” she told the outlet.

“And so we’re seeing that the grooming process is happening both in person and online. And so perpetrators are accessing children through their social media. They are usurping parental guardianship by, you know, texting kids and having Facetimes and things like that,” Jeglic concluded.