By Veena Bharwani

THE Singapore teacher who had sex with her student is a first here but in the US it has been going on for some time.

Over the past decade, more and more cases have surfaced there.

Related link: » S'pore teachers becoming bolder » Teachers can't do as they wish » Blurring the line between teachers and students » Ex-teacher had sex with teen

In the first case to gain worldwide media attention, Mary Kay Letourneau, 47, was jailed for raping her former sixth-grade student in 1997 near Seattle.

Another case that made the headlines in 2004, Debra Lafave, 28, a former model-turned-teacher in Florida, seduced a 14-year-old student in a classroom and at her Florida home.

In the third case in the same year, former physical education teacher Pamela Joan Rogers had sex with a 13-year-old student in Tennessee.

The latest case happened last month.

A San Diego elementary school teacher had a four-year sexual relationship with one of her students, beginning when he was 11. The child is also her godson.

Carmina Erica Lopez, 32, surrendered to detectives at a Mission Hills home last month.

These women were married and to husbands who were not abusive and held responsible jobs.

In short, they seemed to lead normal, fulfilling lives.

Letourneau already had four children with her husband when she started her sexual relationship with her student.

So what then pushed these women to the edge?

Dr Robert Shoop, director of the Cargill Center for Ethical Leadership at Kansas State University and author of Sexual Exploitation in Schools told Oprah.com that these teachers have a poor concept of boundaries, so they don't recognise when they've crossed the line into inappropriate behaviour.

Even as police handcuffed her, Lafave admitted in an interview that she didn't feel she had committed a crime.

'I was thinking of myself as a young girl who just got caught with her boyfriend.'

In a lot of these cases, the woman thinks she has fallen in love, reported Oprah.com.

Notoriously, after serving several years in prison for having sex with a minor, teacher Letourneau married her student.

She was 33 when she began an affair with her then 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau.

When she was found out the next year and arrested, the married mother of four was already pregnant with the boy's daughter.

According to AP, in February 1997, her former husband Steve Letourneau found love letters that his wife had written to her ex-student. Later that month, one of his relatives reported the affair to officials at Shorewood Elementary.

The police were notified, and Letourneau - who was pregnant with Fualaau's child then - was arrested and charged with statutory rape.

Her mental state came to light during trial when a defence psychiatrist testified that she suffered from bipolar disorder, a form of manic depression, according to an AFP report.

Letourneau was sentenced to 71/2 years in prison during which she gave birth to their daughter.

Conditional release

After serving 80 days, she was granted a release on the condition that she enter a treatment programme for sex offenders and she was forbidden from having any contact with Fualaau, according to AFP.

However, on 3 Feb 1998, police discovered Letourneau in a car with Fualaau and arrested her for violating the conditions of her suspended sentence. She became pregnant again and in October 1998, supposedly conceived during her brief period of parole, reported by AFP.

After giving birth to her second child with Fualaau, she began serving a seven-year prison sentence. Released on parole in August 2004, she quickly married her young lover, who by then had turned 21, according to AFP.

LeFave too battled with bipolar disorder when she engaged in sexual relations with her student.

She allegedly told her student that her marriage was in trouble and that she was aroused by the fact that having sex with him was not allowed, according to CNN online.

Lafave pleaded guilty to the charge and was placed under house arrest for three years and given probation for seven years.

In an NBC interview in 2006, Lafave said of her mental state: 'You know what, I don't want to blur the lines between doing something as heinous as what I did, and being bipolar. But, yes, symptoms of bipolar definitely contributed to my mind frame.'

Sexual obsession was what pushed physical education teacher Rogers to have sex with her then 13-year-old student.

She was first arrested in February 2005 and pleaded no contest to charges of statutory rape. During the three-month relationship, Rogers and the teen had sex more than a dozen times, in the school, in her house, and in the teen's home in Feb 2005 according to USA Today.

She was jailed for nine months.

No end to obsession

But the sexual sexual obsession over the boy did not end.

According to an AP report, Rogers was arrested again in April 2006 on charges that she had sent text messages, nude photos, and sex videos of herself to the same boy while using her father's mobile phone. Rogers was sentenced to 7 years in prison for violating her probation.

According to a Nashville news website, a clinical psychologist hired by the teacher's family testified that the teacher was a sex addict and sexually immature. Ms Schleicher said: ' (Her) diaries did tell me how much she lived in a dream world .... like somebody that's into video games.'

This article was first published in The New Paper on February 12, 2009.