January/February 2000

Expanded for the Web

In recent years, a number of highly publicized lawsuits and incidents have heightened awareness of sexual harassment in schools. In the newly published Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools (Teachers College Press), Nan Stein examines the roots of sexual harassment-and how to uproot it from our schools. Stein is a senior researcher and project director at Wellesley College's Center for Research on Women in Wellesley, MA. She is also a former middle-school teacher.

HEL: What responses to sexual harassment do you find especially problematic?

STEIN: One of the worst, I think, is making the subject of the harassment confront the harasser. That should be an option, but it should never be a requirement. That puts the burden of changing the harasser's behavior on the kid who was the target of the harassment. The burden has to be on the grownups.

For that same reason, I am not in favor of students mediating without an adult around. I'm not sure that student mediators can be immune from peer pressure. To think that kids can ignore those pressures is a little foolhardy.

If a child does want to confront the harasser, one way to deal with it is to ask the child to write a letter to the harasser-a good technique first developed by Mary Rowe at MIT-and used quite a lot in colleges and university settings, both for students and for employees. If an adult can devote time to really work with a child who wants to write such a letter, then that might be a good option.

Of course, some schools just hand the victim of harassment a form letter to sign. That takes away the whole process for the kid of being able to talk about it with a grownup and going through drafts of the document, to think about what they really want to say. But if it's just a form letter or if there's a requirement that you then have to present it in person to the harasser, I'm very much opposed to that.

HEL: Are bans on mutual touching between students too draconian?

STEIN: A lot of schools have rules about public displays of affection even where it's mutual. Sexual harassment doesn't cover mutual, wanted, sexual contact, so mutual displays of affection are usually not covered by a sexual harassment policy. A lot of touch is affectionate, joyful, or consoling. And schools ought to encourage that. Some administrators have told me that the greatest amount of touching happens when middle school girls are saying good-bye to their girlfriends for the weekend and they're waving and crying and hugging.

HEL: What about teacher-student interaction?

STEIN: I'm in favor of teachers being able to have appropriate physical contact with kids. I was a very touchy teacher. A lot of kids feel like contaminated goods if grownups don't touch them. They read something very negative into that, like, "You don't want to touch me because I'm dirty." Women have more license to touch, quite frankly, because our touch is not held in suspicion, the way a few men have ruined it for all men. I only have two rules about touch, and I've come to these from reading lawsuits: don't put any kid on your lap, and don't give neck rubs and back massages. You can say to a little child, "You get to sit next to me today." But you don't have to put a kid on your lap. They can sit close by and still feel special.

HEL: How can a school set a policy that is balanced but won't get people into trouble?

STEIN: The faculty and the administrators need to talk about what is appropriate adult-to-student contact, and maybe have the lawyers there, too. It ought to happen as a conversation, and not as a dictum from the administration. But I'm not a lawyer so my advice isn't going to protect anybody from a lawsuit.

HEL: What's the difference between sexual harassment and bullying?

STEIN: Bullying involves repeated harassment, either physical or verbal, of someone who is weaker. It can be sexual in nature but it doesn't have to be. Bullying that is sexual in nature--sexual harassment, in other words--is illegal. But other kinds of bullying aren't necessarily illegal, taunting or name-calling that aren't sexual, for instance. Exclusion is a way of bullying that you see with girls a lot. They'll say, "You can't play with me" or "I'm not going to be your best friend anymore." That isn't sexual harassment, and it's not illegal. But it's a kind of bullying.

I use the framework of bullying as a way to address sexual harassment with younger kids without having to use the expression "sexual harassment," which they might not understand. It really has more to do with what's appropriate for their age. That's not to say you can't have litigation with younger kids on sexual harassment.

HEL: At what point does verbal taunting turn into harassment?

STEIN: For something [verbal] to be sexual harassment, it has to be severe, or persistent, or pervasive that takes on a life of its own and affects a kid's work and concentration. I wouldn't say that a one-time statement is equivalent to sexual harassment. In one famous case, 15 boys harassed this one girl verbally, mooing like cows whenever they saw her and talking about the size of her breasts. They did this outside of school, in school, on the way to school. Other kids heard it and saw it. Teachers and custodians told the administrator, who kept saying, "It's not a big deal." It became disruptive. Sexual harassment erodes the notion that school is a safe place to be.

HEL: So sexual harassment is a school safety issue?

STEIN: Yes. School safety is more than metal detectors and see-through backpacks and getting rid of lockers. Sexual harassment has to be seen within this context of school safety, because there are sexual assaults in schools. There are rapes. Some kids are afraid to go to school because of sexual harassment. This interferes with everything that school's supposed to do for you: teach, socialize, be a friendly place, make friends, trust adults.

HEL: Do you find that schools often deal with boys and girls differently in terms of sexual harassment.

STEIN: Yes, even with little pranks. When boys are mooning girls, and then girls decide to moon them back-and I'm not endorsing mooning here-the girls get a much more severe punishment, because the act of mooning is seen as especially inappropriate for their gender. When a girl wears a raunchy T-shirt with some sexual innuendo-"naked coed whatever"-it's seen as being unladylike. For boys, it's taken as locker-room behavior. It's tolerated.

HEL: What about when parents pressure administrators to "let boys be boys"?

STEIN: There are parents who get absolutely outraged that a school administrator has dared to consider that what their child has done to be sexual harassment. But you know what? Parents don't get to determine that. Administrators are responsible for the kids' behavior in school, and after several prominent lawsuits, they're much more conscious now of abiding by Title IX [which prohibits federal spending for any educational program that engages in sexual discrimination].

HEL: Is it really helpful for schools to post their sexual harassment policies?

STEIN: Not unless they put such policies into user-friendly words for the kids and really talk about what the policies mean. A sexual harassment policy might say, "No unwanted physical contact." But what does that mean to an 8th grader? Even more explicit language is not always enough. A policy can say, "No pinching, patting, or grabbing," and kids will go around kneeing each other in the butt because, well, kneeing is not pinching. Kids are always pushing the envelope. So you really have to have a conversation about it and include it in the curriculum. That gives the grownups the advantage of learning from kids.

Kids are the best critics of their own subcultures. They should be allowed to tell us not only what they see going on but how they categorize certain behaviors. As with grownups, touching for kids means different things in different contexts. Kids may regard certain behavior as harassment that we hadn't thought of. These conversations are more time-consuming but worth it.

HEL: What about sending policy statements home to parents?

STEIN: This is troubling in schools when a lot of legalese is used or when English is not the home language of parents. You need to make an effort to translate the notices into language parents can read. If you want home-school cooperation, then you've got to work to make parents comfortable and to help them comprehend school policies.

HEL: What do teachers and administrators do when kids use the First Amendment to justify offensive T-shirts or offensive speech?

STEIN: Kids do that all the time. That's where I think we need to have the conversation, and let kids at least understand why decisions are made. I'm all for letting the First Amendment flourish, but that doesn't mean anything goes. You don't have a First Amendment right to cause disruptions in class. And this doesn't mean that kids get to vote on whether they should take tests or on teachers' salaries. Imagine the outcome of that vote!

But sometimes schools don't do a good job of giving kids a forum to air their views. For example, these 8th grade girls in Ames, Iowa made T-shirts with the slogan "C--ks. Nothing to Crow About" in response to some boys who wore T-shirts that read "Hooters. More than a Mouthful." These girls wanted the boys to understand what it felt like to have those gender-specific words staring you in your face. The boys had worn those shirts for more than a year, but when the girls responded both shirts were banned. The girls didn't have a public forum in school where they could talk about it. So they spoke out with these shirts. That wouldn't have been necessary if they had a place at school to talk about how the Hooters shirts made them feel.

We have to teach kids to be participants in the democracy, to live in the marketplace of ideas. Some of those ideas, you're not going to like. Some of them you'll embrace. We have to live out the Bill of Rights and live out the Constitution in schools.

For further information:

N. Stein. Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.

N. Stein. "Sexual Harassment in School: The Public Performance of Gendered Violence." Harvard Educational Review 65:2 (Summer 1995): 145-162.