When six-year-old Johnathan Prevette of North Carolina and his innocent kiss made national headlines two weeks ago, responsible journalists across the country did what responsible journalists are wont to do: They tried to localize the issue for their readerships.
So they trucked off to their local courthouses, and they called their local school administrators, and they found some parallels. Thanks to their work, we now know a series of lawsuits, like a ruling that said California's Antioch Unified School district must pay 11-year-old Tianna Ugarte $500,000 dollars in compensation for the sexual harassment she faced at school. We also now know of a string of additional inane examples, like the case of the seven-year-old from Queens, New York, who received a five-day suspension after kissing a classmate.
(This little boy also ripped a button off of the classmate's skirt, a fact which the reporter failed to mention until halfway through the story, when many readers had no doubt stopped reading.)
Fortified by this arsenal of excess, we rant and rave about the evils of political correctness, about the hypersensitivity in our schools, about the role of the courts in our schools' affairs. Maybe we even talk of tort reform, or we reference "Disclosure" or "Oleana" or Anita Hill and we ask how, how in the world can we throw these burdens on unknowing little boys?
But we say all these things in ignorance.
Our journalists have done us a disservice in limiting our exposure of school sexual harassment to the level of inane, excessive cases.
The reality of the situation is that at the middle school level sexual harassment is a pervasive problem of a nature so severe that it can destroy children's self-confidence and sense of control. The issue doesn't near the murky waters of political correctness that, since blatant sexual harassment has been largely done away with in the workplace, now cloud discussions of sexual harassment between adults. While adults haggle over the he-said-she-said of sexual harassment in the office, children go as far as to rip buttons off of each other's clothing.
If our journalists had known how to best localize this topic, they would have gone to their area schools.
And if they had made a stop in a sixth or seventh grade classroom, and been able to print what they had observed there, our discussions of sexual harassment in schools would be drastically different.
It was not until the recent media attention on this topic that I thought back to my middle school years. I have always remembered them as the worst of my life, but it took these stories to get me thinking about just why.
What I remember now is a feeling of overwhelming embarrassment and degradation caused by dozens of little incidences. I shudder to think of reliving those experiences now; if I were 12, the thought would terrify me.
I also remember that, while I dreaded certain classes and avoided certain hallways and parts of the lunchroom, it did not occur to me that what was going on was wrong. I had heard coming into middle school that people would be mean, and I had watched my friends endure similar abuse. I had also watched my teachers ignore all of the note passing, the whispering and the hidden insults that were often blatantly worked into classroom discussion.
And I certainly did not know what the term sexual harassment meant.
Now, in talking with my friends, I know that my experience was in no way unique.
The bottom line is that the harassment many girls endure in the middle school classroom is one of the primary reasons for the plummeting self-esteem, the loss of assertiveness and the preponderance of resulting problems such as eating disorders to which many pre-teenage girls fall victim. This sort of frightening environment is what Mary Pipher's telling best seller "Reviving Ophelia" is all about. As sociologists marvel at the phenomenon, school systems further it when they allow sexual harassment in the classroom go unchecked.
What kids say and do to kids outside of the classroom-in the hallway or after school hours-is something that schools have little control over. But for schools to fail to provide a harassment-free environment for students within the classroom is a crime. While teachers can't be expected to do away with all sexual innuendo in their classrooms, they certainly can stop most of it, and they can be sure to educate students about just what harassment is.
We can scorn the foolishness of a district that saw a little boy kiss a friend and consequently sent him away from his classroom and the ice cream party he had been looking forward to attending. And we can easily dig up a series of equally inane stories to mock.
But our conscience must not let us do all this without also asking what really does go on in grade school classrooms.
We owe every 12-year-old that service.
Jessica Moulton is a Trinity sophomore and assistant editorial page editor of The Chronicle.
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