The sexual assaults began when the boy was 12. Over a period of about two years, Moiliili karate teacher Michael Shimabukuro molested the boy at the dojo where Shimabukuro taught him and other students.
The youth told authorities that Shimabukuro gave him alcohol, showed him pornographic videos and placed a sexual device on his penis.
A jury in October convicted Shimabukuro of three counts of third-degree sexual assault. He faces up to five years in prison for each count when sentenced in January.
The verdict represented one of the more recent developments in a string of unrelated court cases in which a Hawaii coach or teacher over the past year was convicted of or charged with sexual misconduct involving minors.
Just last month a former Maui substitute teacher was sentenced to 20 years in prison for 16 counts of sexual assault. Prosecutors since November 2011 have pursued similar charges against at least five other instructors.
In all but one of the seven cases, the victims or alleged victims were students.
Adriana Ramelli, executive director of Hawaii’s Sex Abuse Treatment Center, was neither astonished by the number of reported cases in a year’s period nor that they involved coaches or teachers.
"That statistic is not surprising," she said.
In most child sex assault cases, the molesters are known to the victim.
Nationally, strangers generally are responsible for only about 10 percent of the cases, according to Kenneth Lanning, a retired FBI agent and law enforcement consultant who specializes in child sex abuse investigations.
Offenders in the remaining 90 percent generally are family members or acquaintances, and the latter group often includes coaches, teachers, priests, counselors and others in positions of trust with regular access to children, Lanning said.
"The one thing they all have in common is access to kids," Ramelli agreed. "It’s part of the profile of who they are."
That contact allows would-be molesters to groom their victims, sometimes with gifts and extra attention, and eventually seduce them, Lanning said.
The molesters are able to gain control of the situation, convincing the children not to tell others about the abuse, experts say.
That’s what happened in the case involving former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who is serving a 30- to 60-year sentence for abusing 10 boys over more than a decade. Law enforcement authorities only learned of the abuses years after the incidents.
No organization keeps statistics on the number of sexual assault cases involving coaches in Hawaii. But Ramelli’s center reported getting seven cases last year in which the client reported being abused by a teacher or professor. Six such cases were reported in 2010 and eight in 2009.
Offenders who are acquaintances, such as a coach or teacher, often are able to commit the abuse over a prolonged period without arousing suspicion because they seem nice and genuinely interested in helping their wards, according to Lanning and others. Their ruse is so convincing that the abusers typically are able to gain the trust of the child’s parents.
Society has a difficult time dealing with these type of cases because the offender doesn’t fit the stereotype of an evil, perverted stranger lurking at parks or behind bushes looking for his next victim, Lanning added.
"These (acquaintance) cases are frequently more complex and difficult than society wants them to be," he said.
Maui substitute band teacher Jim Alan Balicanta, 40, was no stranger to his victim. She was one of his music students at the middle school she attended, according to published reports.
Balicanta sexually assaulted the girl over a two-year period starting when she was in eighth grade, court documents and the published reports say.
He pleaded no contest to eight counts of first-degree sexual assault and eight counts of third-degree sexual assault and last month received a 20-year sentence. As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors dismissed 36 other sexual assault charges.
With their convictions, Balicanta and Shimabukuro will be required to register for life as sex offenders, adding to a growing list of nearly 3,000 others on Hawaii’s registry.
If any of the five other pending cases result in convictions, the list will expand even more.
