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symposium - pro and con of requiring schools to pay damages to students sexually harassed by other students
Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 by Bernice Sandler, Sarah J. McCarthy
Q: Should schools pay damages for student-on-student sex harassment?
Yes: Without lawsuits, schools will tolerate serious misbehavior that hurts all students.
BY BERNICE SANDLER
In May the Supreme Court decided a case involving a fifth-grade girl who continually had been asked for sexual intercourse by a classmate who sat next to her. The court ruled in Davis vs. Monroe County Board of Education that schools could be required to pay punitive damages for sexual harassment of students by other students. For five months the boy continually tried to touch his classmate's breasts and genitals, saying he wanted to have sex with her. He rubbed up against her in the classroom and hallways of the elementary school they attended. Although the girl's mother complained to the school after each incident, the school would not even reassign the girl's seat. The girl's grades dropped, and her father found a suicide note. Finally, when it became clear that the school would do nothing, the mother filed a criminal complaint against the boy, who pleaded guilty.
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The court confirmed that student-to-student harassment is prohibited by Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools receiving federal dollars. Schools must respond to sexual harassment by students or face the possible loss of federal funds and/or a lawsuit and damages.
Many people are not aware of the extent to which student-to-student sexual harassment is common in many educational institutions. Growing up always has been a difficult time but, in recent years, for whatever reasons, behaviors even among kindergartners and throughout high schools and colleges are worse than ever, and bad behavior occurs more often. Many more youngsters are the victims of behaviors which are far more aggressive, obscene, more insistent and invasive than the behaviors many of us remember when we were in our teens or younger.
There are verbal slurs -- 8-year-olds are called "whores," "sluts" and worse. There is a lot of sexual touching and grabbing. One 6-year-old girl continually was told by fourth-grade boys on the school bus to have oral sex with her father (in far less polite terms); a 13-year-old girl faced a daily gauntlet of 15 to 20 boys, who would stare at her large breasts and together call her a "cow" and follow her around as they "mooed" at her; one boy had a girl put her hand down his pants; some boys and girls continually are asked for sexual activity; and there are children of all ages who have had their crotches grabbed. There are schools in which boys and girls will not wear pants with elastic waists because other children pull them down, often along with underwear. And crotch-grabbing is not a rarity in many schools. One teenager in a magnet school in one the richest counties in the country said that she "hated it when the guys would grab your genitals as you walk up the stairs. You never know who it is because the stairways are crowded."
These behaviors are a blight in all kinds of schools, public and private, and in the best and worst neighborhoods. School buses, outdoor playgrounds, stairways and cafeterias often are hotbeds of sexual harassment, since supervision either is lax or missing.
At one prestigious, small, liberal-arts college, two first-year male students worked in pairs: One would block a female from going forward while the other grabbed her crotch from behind. When the two men were brought before the dean, they said they could not understand what the fuss was about, stating, "But everybody does this in high school!"
If you have children or access to them, don't ask if these things happen to them or if they do any of these things. Instead, tell the child something such as, "Boys [or children] used to do a lot of teasing when I was in school. What kinds of things do they do in your school?" You may be surprised at what they tell you.
Sexual harassment is not simply boys-will-be-boys behavior. It is a form of sexual bullying, using sexuality as a form of power to dominate or terrorize another person. Just as we no longer allow bosses or coworkers to put pressure on employees for sex, whether it is a pat on the rear or a breast being grabbed, schools should not allow their students to suffer the same behaviors that are illegal in the workplace and often rise to the level of sexual abuse. The Supreme Court has ruled that such behaviors no longer can be tolerated in our schools.
In a study of nearly 2,000 students in Texas public schools in grades seven through 12, nearly six in 10 gifts reported that they were harassed every other day, and a large number reported they were harassed on average once a week. Boys were responsible for 70 percent of the incidents reported by all children. When the results for boys and girls were combined, 89 percent of the students experienced some form of sexual harassment. Few reported it to their parents or teachers. Of those who reported an incident to a teacher, two-thirds said that nothing happened to the harasser.
