The Bullying Pulpit

If you think that primary schools don’t spend enough time on education now, just wait. As a famous guy once said, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

“To achieve a gender-safe school, I think we need to employ several simultaneous strategies to ensure that sexual harassment will not have a presence there,” Wellesley’s Nan Stein writes in Radical Teacher. “I suggest that we call this ‘zero indifference,’ rather than ‘zero tolerance,’ which would mean that we plan to notice the behaviors, comment on them, intervene, and make corrections accordingly.”

Stein is a “senior research scientist” at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women who “has written several curricula for schools on these issues.” Radical Teacher is “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.”

“Institute classroom education and curriculum that are long-term, engaging, fun (not lectures by the school board attorney), and age-appropriate,” Stein suggests. “The more the subject of sexual harassment—and I like to also connect it to ‘gender or sexual violence’—can be integrated into the whole curriculum and to the main texts that the students are using, the better.”

“That way the topic does not create the burden of an add-on to the teachers, because it is an integral part of the curriculum and not added on as an afterthought.” I can’t wait to see how they are going to work this into algebra.

“Train all the staff, including the administrators, custodians, school secretaries, bus drivers, coaches, teachers, guidance counselors, playground and lunchroom supervisors, and psychologists,” Stein advises. Can they learn their jobs first?

“Designate a variety of ombudspeople—ideally diverse in gender, sexuality, race, and nationality in order to enhance approachability—to whom students can go with inquiries or concerns and who will act on their behalf,” Stein recommends.

(How many counselors does it take to change a lightbulb? None, that’s a different
union.)

In the 10-point concluding recommendations, #8 is “Involve parents—both through open community forums as well as in private discussions, especially if their children are involved in incidents of sexual harassment.” Either it was an afterthought or she was trying to reach her word count or both.

Her evidence of harassment? Part of it comes from a 1998 World Health Organization study. “The results for the U. S. showed that nearly 30 % of the sample reported moderate or frequent involvement in bullying, either as the bully (13%), one who was bullied (10.6%), or both (6.3%).” Then wouldn’t the “both” be a subset of the first and the second categories and bring the percentage to not quite 25?

Stein also cites the 2001 American Association of University Women survey that shows that “83% of the girls and 79% of the boys indicated they had been sexually harassed.” She never mentions the other AAUW finding that “Three-quarters of students (76 percent) experience nonphysical sexual harassment at some point in their school lives, more than half (54 percent) often or occasionally.”

The AAUW report very infamously lumped rape together with name calling as forms of sexual harassment. “Sexual harassment—and all the bullying, teasing, and touching it
entails—is pervasive: Four out of every five students personally experience it,” Sharon Schuster, then the President of the AAUW Educational Foundation wrote in her introduction to the report. “While many students say harassment is no big deal—just part of school life—names do hurt: ‘a kid called me a fag’; ‘sexual name calling’; ‘simple verbal assault’; ‘girls spreading rumors about me.’”

“Physical acts hurt, too: ‘someone forced my clothes off’; ‘a guy grabbed my butt’; ‘I saw a boy who put his hands down a girl’s shirt and then down her pants but she could do nothing about it because he was cool.’” Significantly, neither Stein nor the Schuster dwell on the actual physical acts committed by public school employees, which Bill Donahue of the Catholic League has highlighted and the U. S. Department of Education commissioned a study on.

Even the AAUW research provides some information that indicates this is a phenomenon that requires further investigation. “A large number of students report that teachers and other school employees sexually harass students, although this number has declined since
1993 (38 percent today vs. 44 percent in 1993),” the researchers found in 2001.

But addressing that form of child abuse would require much more than the counseling and training that Stein focuses on and that teachers’ unions will agree to.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.