In the fight against sexual harassment, schools are the last frontier. The Clarence Thomas hearings raised awareness of harassment on the job, but “there are things that go on in the hallways, the parking lots, at band practice, that are as bad if not worse,” says Pat Callbeck Harper, a “gender-equity specialist” for the Montana schools. Experts also believe that the boy who throws spitballs at girls in his class will grow up to be the man who tries to drop peanuts down their dresses at bars. “There are still too many people who say ‘boys will be boys’,” warns Leslie Wolfe of the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington. “If no one teaches boys that harassment is wrong, why should they stop harassing women as adults?” And by characterizing as “harassment” the activities of second graders, the women’s movement has achieved a major political break-through: a definition of oppression so broad that no man alive can be sure he’s innocent.
Teasing is a problem that dates back at least to the first inkwell and pigtail, and pubescent girls have long suffered truly degrading abuse from adolescent boys. Authorities assert the problem is worsening, although they can’t be sure, since the only study was done at a single high school in 1986. There, half the girls reported harassment of various kinds, including remarks, touching, gestures and staring. Most other evidence is anecdotal, such as the longstanding tradition of “Friday flip-up day” at Montana elementary schools, a competition among boys to see how many girls’ skirts they can lift. But now prominent scholars such as Nan Stein of Wellesley College Center for Research on Women are studying it-and finding it, in Stein’s words, “an everyday phenomenon.”
What has changed is that girls and their parents are less disposed to accept harassment as a normal part of growing up. They have discovered a powerful weapon in the ban on sex discrimination in Title IX of the Education Act of 1972. This provision has usually been invoked over issues such as equality in sports programs, but last February the Supreme Court ruled that under the statute students can sue for harassment-and collect damages. That case involved a high-school student who claimed her teacher forced sex on her. But by analogy to the workplace-where the court has held companies liable if their employees create a “hostile environment” forco-workers–the principle is likely to be extended to cases where boys make life miserable for their classmates, as only they know how.
This is already happening in some states, notably in Minnesota, which has recently begun to require schools to have policies prohibiting student-on-student harassment. In Chaska, Minn., Jill Olson was appalled that boys were circulating a list of the 25 most desirable-they used a very different word-girls in her high school, and that she was one of them. (She was even more appalled to learn that some of the other girls on the list were flattered.) Her complaint was investigated by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and referred to the state attorney general. In Petaluma, Calif., eighth grader Tawnya Brawdy had to run a gantlet of boys gathered outside her school who would begin mooing as she approached. “It went on before school, during classes, in between classes and during lunch,” says Tawnya, adding that her teacher told her she’d just have to put up with it. Boys continued to moo at her all through high school. The U.S. Department of Education found, in a 211-page report, that the schools had failed to protect her. Her mother, Louise, now heads a group called Parents for Title 9.
In what other school boards might consider a warning, Brawdy sued her district over “emotional distress” and collected $20,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Most judgments in these cases have been small, but the potential number of plaintiffs is huge. So it’s likely that what has usually been treated as a routine nuisance will increasingly become a serious disciplinary matter. And, while there may not be a man today who can honestly say he never spent most of a math period staring at the prettiest girl in his class instead of a blackboard … someday there might be.
