Thanks to the #MeToo movement, many understand power dynamics. But here's why cases of coaches abusing students tend to fall through the cracks.

• Cases of misconduct among educators in various sports are often underreported, according to a sexual violence prevention expert.
• No national dataset exists to track educators who abuse kids in school, Professor Elizabeth Jeglic told Insider.

Seven cheerleading coaches in South Carolina are facing multiple misconduct allegations against student-athletes, including rape, providing drugs to students, inappropriate touching, and the dissemination of sexual images, according to court documents filed earlier this month.

Idaho officials earlier this month charged a former basketball coach with 20 counts of rape on September 2 following a months-long investigation.

And a former wrestling coach in Arkansas was arrested on September 1 on suspicion of sexual assault in the first degree of a minor.

There have been numerous reports in recent months – and some high-profile cases over the last several years — of coaches accused of sexual misconduct, particularly against young athletes. But experts note that cases of misconduct among some coaches in various sports are often underreported.

And some incidents of abuse tend to fall through the cracks — until it's too late.

There is no national dataset that accounts for sexual misconduct committed by instructors or coaches.

A sexual violence prevention expert told Insider that scant data exist on instructor misconduct, partly because the US school system is managed on a state level.

Some states, such as Pennsylvania, do maintain publicly available databases that list educators accused of misconduct, Elizabeth Jeglic, a professor who studies sexual violence at John Jay College in New York, told Insider. But not all states track or provide that.

The lack of data might also be attributable to the fact that "very few people disclose what happened to them," Jeglic said. "So the data that we have is only based on official reporting records, and so the rates are very low."

And many educators who commit misconduct involving minors might not be reported in the news, which means instances of misconduct in schools nationwide are not known to the public, she said.

Coaches or teachers who make it into the news are often already facing consequences, such as a lawsuit or a criminal charge, experts note. But teachers and coaches who have yet to be found out for committing misconduct are often just flying under the radar.

One of the most recent large-scale studies of educator misconduct was conducted in 2004 by the Department of Education. The study estimated at the time that nearly 10% of all K-12 students in the US experienced either verbal, visual, or physical misconduct at the hands of their educators.

Since then, Jeglic says in a recent scholarly article, few studies of an equivalent scale have been orchestrated.

In an updated dataset published this year, Jeglic and a team of researchers asked more than 6,600 recent high school grads about their own experiences with educator sexual misconduct.

About 12% of all participants said they've experienced sexual misconduct at the hands of their teachers from kindergarten to 12th grade. A fifth of the educators accused of sexual misconduct were coaches, according to the results of Jeglic's study.

Coaches have wide-ranging privileges

The difference between coaches and academic teachers is that coaches might have access to students in unique ways.

It might be easy for coaches to get away with sexual misconduct because of the required proximity to children in a space that's oftentimes free of other adults, Jeglic said.

School coaches are tasked with guiding student-athletes through difficult physical maneuvers. That often means that coaches have to physically place their hands on a student to either evaluate a complaint of pain or demonstrate a way to complete an action.

"Depending on the sport, there might be one-on-one contact," Jeglic said. "There's contact before school, after school, sometimes on the weekends. If they're going to competition, there might be overnight stays. So they have a different way of interacting with students."

Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, for example, used the guise of medical examinations to sexually abuse hundreds of athletes when he worked for Michigan State and the USA Gymnastics, which trains Olympians. Nassar is now serving a decades-long prison sentence after hundreds of girls and young women came forward.

Although Nassar wasn't a coach, he had the same kind of access to athletes that coaches often have and occasionally exploit, Jeglic said.

A combination of authority — which accompanies titles, age, and other factors like gender — and access might make an athlete "question" whether they're experiencing something necessary or exploitative, Jeglic said.

And if an athlete is unsure that they had experienced sexual misconduct at the hands of a coach or similar personnel, that might deter them from coming forward and speaking about it with a trusted adult.

Coaches might also text their students. "So they have the ability to cross those boundaries a lot more easily than other types of teachers," Jeglic said.

At the same time, parents might put pressure on kids to participate in sports to be more competitive applicants for colleges, making it harder for student-athletes to come forward with reports of misconduct.

"They and their family have often given up so much for them to reach the levels they're at," Jeglic said.

It also doesn't help that coaches accused of sexual misconduct are often the best in their field and well-liked. They form relationships with not just the individual athletes, but also with their affiliated institutions and surrounding communities, Jeglic pointed out, making them "trusted" people.

"Unlike other types of offenders, sex offenders can often be more educated, have higher-level positions, be members of the community," Jeglic said. "They play on that, and that's why they go undetected. Nobody's going to think that somebody who is well-liked, beloved, who their family knows is going to do something like that. So if suspicions arise, they are often dismissed."

There's a perception that sexual abusers are random people who lurk in white vans, Jeglic said.

"But really when you look at the data, it's those among us and often people in positions of power," she said.

'We're talking about it more'

The #MeToo movement encouraged people to pay attention to power dynamics and abuses of power. In the wake of the movement, Jeglic said, students have been reporting sexual misconduct more.

"I think we are increasingly becoming aware," she said.

"Sexual violence is on the decrease, even though it doesn't feel like it," Jeglic added. "So while we might be hearing about it more, it's not because it's happening more, but just because we're talking about it more."

But there's still a lot of work to be done, she said.

In many families, sex is still a taboo subject. And sex education across the US ranges widely; in some parts of the country, it's not mandatory or has been scrutinized.

In Illinois, for example, after Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law mandating that all schools teach sex ed in adherence to the National Sex Education Standards. However, one lawmaker called the move "over-the-top and obscene." And a Florida school board rejected sex ed textbooks that talk in part about pregnancy and having healthy relationships.

That means school administrators are unaware of the extent of the problem, as presented in Jeglic's research, and are therefore ill-equipped to bring down the number of instances of misconduct.

"So when somebody experiences sexual abuse, they sometimes don't feel like this is something that they can share," Jeglic said. "They feel like somehow it's their fault and a lot of people don't report. The majority of children do not report sexual abuse that happens to them."