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Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools & Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in our Schools. . - Reviews - book review
Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by Pam Chamberlain
CLASSROOMS AND COURTROOMS: FACING SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN K-12 SCHOOLS
by Nan Stein (Teachers College Press, 1999)
ZERO TOLERANCE: RESISTING THE DRIVE FOR PUNISHMENT IN OUR SCHOOLS
by William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Rick Ayers, eds. (New Press, 2001)
When I was in kindergarten, David Coady bit my arm during milk and crackers time. I have no idea why he did it, but under some school policies these days, that act (which certainly got my attention and that of Miss Nelson, my teacher, as well) might just be termed sexual harassment, or maybe assault with a dental weapon. Or perhaps this is a more clear-cut example of sexual harassment: my driver's ed teacher repeatedly "adjusting" my adolescent shoulders to improve my posture in the driver's seat.
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It's always nice to find analytical material on K-12 education that examines what's been happening in our schools from a progressive perspective. As the country's leaders in general, and schools in particular, slouch towards the Right, two books offer reassurance that we are well represented by some worthy school watchdogs on the Left: Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools by Nan Stein and Zero Tolerance. Resisting the Drive for Punishment in our Schools ed. William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Rick Ayers. If these authors' names sound familiar, you may recall Ayers and Dohrn from their days in the Weather Underground and Stein as a leading expert on sexual harassment in schools. What each of these books brings to us is a social context that helps explain why students have increasingly lost their rights in schools and suffered from repressive, criminalizing policies on the streets.
Classrooms and Courtrooms contains an historical overview of how K-12 schools have dealt with the problem of sexual harassment. First acknowledged as a women's issue in the workplace and in higher education, sexual harassment became recognized as prevalent in schools in the 1980s. Stein's research, influenced by her feminist and anti-racist perspectives, and coupled with her summaries of all relevant studies, demonstrates the frequency of the phenomenon. In schools sexual harassment is unwanted sexual attention that interferes with the right to an education. According to Stein, sexual harassment in schools is characterized by four main themes. 1) It is performed publicly; that is, there are often bystanders and witnesses, both students and adults who readily recognize the behavior. 2) Schools tend to treat the problem, however, as something to be hidden, a secret. 3) The targets, most often but not always girls, are not passive recipients of this unwanted attention, especially if the perpetrators are peers. T argets readily fight back, complain and report sexual harassment. 4) Unfortunately, schools tend to respond to claims of sexual harassment by trivializing the incidents, applying innocuous remedies or inappropriately setting rigid, mandatory punishments.
Stein includes simple definitions of terms related to sexual harassment and demonstrates the connections among sex discrimination, gender harassment and gender violence. She explains how Title IX outlawed both sex discrimination and sexual harassment. She has collected a useful compendium of case law as it relates to schools and leads us through the murky waters of recent court decisions, even as they issue contradictory and ambiguous opinions. It is, in fact, these contradictions that expose the current confusion about how we as a society should handle incidents of sexual harassment in schools.
This confusion is not the result of cloudy thinking on the part of educators. Instead it exposes conflicting ideologies about acceptable behavior in school. When Stein examines the relationship of bullying in elementary school to sexual harassment in the upper grades, she sees similar patterns and correctly identifies that they are both rooted in similar norms. What are these norms? Those who allow bullying and sexual harassment to continue in school settings reinforce the beliefs that a) social organization is hierarchical; b) at the top of the status ladder are whites, males, and those who exhibit American standards of beauty; c) higher status individuals are entitled to behave in ways that reinforce their status even if they are violent; and d) such violence is condoned or inadequately responded to. It comes as no surprise that these norms are implicit in a conservative world view.
Stein is additionally helpful by documenting how schools have misapplied punishments to sexual harassment. She chronicles the trend by schools to react to claims of sexual harassment through overkill, as in the example of the 6 year old boy who kissed his female classmate on the playground, was accused of sexual harassment and became the subject of media attention for two straight weeks in 1996. For me the most useful part of this book was the invitation to examine the underlying currents of thought beneath the surface of school policy. What motivated the school to rush to judgment about such an incident? Why was this so interesting to network news and talk shows? Where was the girl's side of the story? How can this incident illuminate paths we might take in challenging draconian school punishments?
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