(The Center Square) - Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed bills Friday to define grooming as a crime and requiring school districts to define appropriate communication between staff and students.
Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, said she was compelled to propose the grooming bill after the Kenosha grooming case of a teacher that led to 12 misdemeanors and sentence of 450 days in jail and three years of probation.
During that case, Nedweski said prosecutors were looking for an enhanced charge and she began working to create a specific grooming law.
The case also led to Nedweski’s sponsoring of the bill on appropriate communications between students and staff.
The Kenosha case involved former teacher Christian Enwright, who was convicted of the misdemeanors after evidence of thousands of text messages over two school years with a then-12-year-old student were shown in court.
“Keeping our kids safe, especially while they’re in our schools, must be a top priority for us, whether it’s addressing grooming, gun violence, bullying, or other harmful behavior,” Evers said in a statement. “We have an important obligation to make sure our kids can feel secure, supported, and cared for by educators and staff in our schools—adults they should be able to trust and depend on—while also providing more clarity about what interactions with students are inappropriate and unacceptable and enhancing punishments for adults who violate that sacred trust,”
The new law would make grooming a felony charge that could lead to 10 years in prison, with further penalty if the offender was in a position of trust over the victim, if there are multiple victims, or if the victim has a disability.
The bill defines grooming as “a course of conduct, pattern of behavior, or series of acts with the intention to condition, seduce, solicit, lure, or entice a child for the purpose of engaging in sexual intercourse or sexual contact or for the purpose of producing, distributing, or possessing depictions of the child engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
“Defining grooming is a critical step to give law enforcement and local school districts the tools they need to hold bad actors accountable for hurting our kids, and I’m glad the Legislature took this seriously this session and passed bipartisan legislation to get this done,” Evers said.
The communication bill requires school districts to adopt a policy by Sept. 1 that includes punishments, up to firing, for those employees and volunteers who violate the policy in their official capacity.
