And every time I read one, I remember.
Published by Lisa Kansas July 21st, 2008 in Bodily Autonomy, What Patriarchy?, Shame on you for being a womanStories like this have cropped up with more and more regularity in the past several years:
Questions Surround Kids’ Sexual Harassment Charges
Between 70 to 100 of the state’s youngest school children are suspended each year for sexually harassing their classmates, state education records from 2003 to 2006 show.
The disciplinary tactics are prompting concerns from parents, educators and academics about the appropriateness of charging young children with sexual harassment.
“They cannot understand what it means. They’re too young. They’re just babies,” said Linda Burke, whose grandson attends the Downey Elementary School in Brockton.
Oh, my. Really?
None of the stories are ever really supportive of the girls. At best, they’re like the one I linked to above, or this one. At worst, they’re so skewed that if it wasn’t such a sad state of affairs, it’d be funny–
…here’s another example of how our schools have become hostile environments for our boys…
Were they much friendlier in the days of yore for our boys..?
Let’s jump into the Wayback Machine and find out–
I met Drew in the first grade. I had started a new school in the middle of the year; I was new to the town, and the state, and the concept of a winter season; I was also new to the concept of school as academia and not adjusting very well to it. Not that I was a troublesome child, quite the opposite!—but I couldn’t understand why we spent all day practicing skills we had all mastered so long ago we no longer remembered acquiring them, nor why all the other children pretended they were so hard. So I spent a lot of time staring out the window daydreaming, and consequently never noticed, during reading period one day, the boy who snuck under the table where my reading group was sitting and slowly inched his way between the other students’ chairs til he got to where I was sitting.
My first inkling that he was there at all was his hard quick pinch of my clitoris through my underwear. I screamed and slammed my dress-clad knees shut hard; he wiggled out from under the table, laughing even as the teacher scolded him and sent him back to his own table. She patted my shoulder and I didn’t cry, or more pertinently throw up, which was what I felt like doing. I couldn’t have said why what he had done had revolted me far beyond just the physical hurt of the pinch. I wasn’t able to articulate even to myself the feeling of violation and disgust. Certainly I never sat in class again with anything but legs locked tightly together, sometimes so tightly that I got pins and needles in my feet, but other than that, I tried as hard as possible to forget it had ever happened.
Drew didn’t allow that to happen. If my gaze happened to touch upon him, he smiled at me, sometimes waggling his tongue out. He tormented a few of the other girls and bullied some of the smaller boys and so gave me some respite, but he never went a week without attempting to sit near me, stand near me or speak to me. He was unsuccessful but didn’t get tired, as I fervently hoped, of trying. Luckily he didn’t ride the bus like I did, and clearly lived nowhere near me; after school let out for the summer I didn’t see him at all. As summer wore on, I managed to almost forget about his existence.
The school was back in session and I was a second-grader and Drew, while still at the same school, wasn’t in my class. All the classes in each grade had shared recess, so I saw him then, but for the first three or four months of school it was just from a distance—I didn’t know why he’d lost interest but absolutely did not care. I was grateful and left it at that and by Christmas break had convinced myself that the entirety of the previous year had been mostly a figment of my imagination; of course him grabbing me that one day hadn’t been my imagination, but I decided that my conviction that he had singled me out for more disgusting abuse had been.
Unfortunately, whatever had been distracting him from my existence previously was no longer in effect after we returned from Christmas break. He began stalking me at recess; if I didn’t keep a sharp eye out while standing in line for hopscotch or jumprope he would be right there behind me, trying to touch my bottom and whisper in my ear things that I didn’t understand but felt the same revulsion for as when he touched me. Dodgeball became pure punishment; I was always his target and while I was a fairly quick and nimble child, he was a natural athlete—one reason why few to none of the other kids ever stood up to his bullying. In books, the bully is big and fat and dumb; he was tall and lean and not particularly stupid—he never did anything that any recess teacher would be forced to notice and intervene, and my shy and stammering attempts to ask them to please help me were met with responses ranging from smiling platitudes to contemptuous irriation.
Around that time, a new boy transferred to my class, named Robert. He was quiet—unlike Drew he was built like a block, but he was just as athletic, though his athleticism was more in terms of strength and upper body coordination than speed and agility. Also unlike Drew, he wasn’t a bully—he didn’t talk much, but he certainly didn’t pick on anybody. The teacher put us together for a month or so in a practice group for multiplication table memorization and while I (yep, still clueless) wondered why we were having to say them over and over again every day, was willing to do so and also willing to share with Robert the tricks my grandpa had taught me to help remember them a few years before. And about a month before school let out for the summer, Robert asked me to be his girlfriend.
I was extremely surprised. When I shared the story with my best friend Danielle, she didn’t seem surprised at all, just pragmatic. “Well, are you?” she asked.
I was even more surprised that she’d think there was any chance I’d say yes. “But why?” I asked, honestly bewildered. I thought Robert was a nice boy but we didn’t talk outside of multiplication tables; what would I do with him? Frankly, what would I do with any boyfriend? What were they supposed to be for?
“You should tell him yes,” she said. “He’d protect you.”
Protect me?
And that’s when I first began to understand what being female really meant.
I still remember her voice, saying it: ”He’d protect you.” I remember it because I finally understood.
Some boys want to do things to you that you don’t want.
You can’t make them stop because they’re bigger than you.
Adults don’t make them stop because they don’t care.
Only other boys can make them stop.
But other boys won’t do it unless you let them be your boyfriend.
As I hadn’t really contemplated saying yes before, I hadn’t actually spent any time wondering what being my boyfriend would have in it for Robert. So the next day, I asked him. It became quickly clear that he wanted the same things as Drew wanted, albeit coached much less crudely and nastily. And the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.
You have to do those things with your boyfriend instead.
It seemed like a zero-sum move to me, so I told Robert no. Danielle sighed and shook her head, but didn’t try to convince me further. I managed to evade Drew for the remainder of the school year with reasonable success and then it was summer break again.
That summer we moved. I was now within walking distance of the school. It took Drew a few weeks of the third grade, where we were once again in the same class, to realize that I wasn’t taking the bus home anymore. And then things got pretty bad.
Anyone out there read Bridge to Terabithia? Read it, not seen the movie—I have no idea if the movie was even remotely faithful to the book. If you have, you might remember that the kids in the school had races every day and popularity was heavily based on the outcome of those. Our school wasn’t quite that intense about it, but in the third grade, we all did know who were the fastest kids. I was proud to be fourth-fastest, and the second-fastest girl. But the fastest kid in our grade was Drew.
I mention this because he and his little gang started chasing me home from school every fucking day. I mean EVERY fucking day. None of the other boys (sometimes two, sometimes three) were as fast as me, but that didn’t mean a lot since Drew was faster. I had any number of stratagems that enabled me to get enough of a headstart that I made it home before they could catch me—if I could get into my backyard I was safe, as we owned a German Shepherd-Greyhound mix named Empress who resided there and was happy to scare off any chasers. However, sometimes my stratagems failed. And Drew would catch me, and hold me til the other boys reached me, and then they would all push me down and the best I can say for the experiences were that they didn’t actually remove any of my clothes or their own.
After a month of this I was losing my mind. My mother was as useless as any other adult—she didn’t care for sissies nor tattletales, was made clear to me. Perhaps if I could have articulated more clearly what exactly Drew was doing to me..? I did manage to communicate that he was “chasing” me and “kissing” me; even that very incomplete description was horribly shaming to me, and it didn’t produce any noticeable softening in her stance.
But I did remember the epiphany of the previous school year.
So I steeled myself and waited for Drew to be alone on the playground—he didn’t bother me at recess anymore much, and why would he? He had a lot more fun with me after school—and approached him. And offered to be his girlfriend.
If, I said, he kept the rest of his friends off me, and didn’t chase me anymore or push me down or hurt me at all, I would agree to walk with him in school, and hold his hand, and sneak kisses at recess, and he could walk me home and touch me a little and I would announce publicly that he was my boyfriend.
It did indeed work. He got pretty hard-core on his boys—they were all scared of him anyway so it didn’t take too much for them to forget they ever had anything to do with me. He made it clear to everyone else that they’d better not so much as look cross-eyed at me. He became positively affectionate. And amazingly respectful of the boundaries I set. My willingness had bought what all my resistance could not. Or, more accurately, his embraced delusion of my willingness did. If third-graders can fall in love, he certainly had by the end of the school year. And it was funny how everybody, even my best friend, forgot how he used to treat me before. When he gave me a necklace with a locket the last week of school, Danielle was so jealous she almost cried. I only wished he was remotely interested in her so she could have him instead.
My family moved again that summer, just a few days after school was over, all the way across town and into a new elementary school district. I didn’t see Drew again until high school, and then only in passing. He never tried to speak to me there and for all I know, had completely forgotten who I was. I didn’t consciously think of him much myself—by that time I had already had so much reinforcement from others around me and just society in general of the basic lessons he and everyone else involved in the situation had taught me about the kind and amount of value and power a female has versus that of males that I no longer dwelled on one example so many years ago.
How early do you start warping a tree so that it grows into a stunted dwarf? The earlier you start, the more successful the stunting.
How young do you start teaching females that their bodies are objects to be won and fondled, that the only choice they have for any control over its fate is in emotional manipulation of the male? The earlier you start…
Well. I guess Glenn Sacks is right. Elementary school wasn’t a hostile environment for Drew at all back then–quite a rewarding one actually. Of course for m– Oh, wait. I wasn’t a boy. So, you know, fuck what kind of environment it was for me, eh? Wonder how Glenn’s readers feel about the lessons all the girls of my generation learned about aforementioned emotional manipulation and the use of sex as a tool to use one man to fend off the rest..? Oh, wait. I know how they feel about that–!
Sorry, fellahs. Can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
70-100 students? That’s like .0000001% of the school. That’s a nothing amount.
I have many stories like yours growing up, although most not nearly as bad. I wonder how many other women would too if you asked them?
The thing I don’t understand about the argument “they don’t understand it” is this: little kids at that age don’t understand too much. We punish children for being tardy before they know how to read time, or really what time even is. We punish children for being violent, before they understand why hitting is bad. We punish children so that they know it’s wrong, and they don’t do it again. If you have critisms of punishing kids so they learn obedience rather than morals, I’d have a discussion. But in this case, people aren’t arguing that teaching them obedience is wrong, it’s that they shouldn’t have to be obedient in this realm.
Thanks for telling that story.
I was harassed and assaulted by a boy in my class from Grade 4 to Grade 8. He pegged me early on as a victim, and made my time in school hellish and terrifying. Not one adult stood up for me, even though in the 80s there was a lot of “No Means No” messages being given to little girls, because hey, he was a kid my age, so it was just “teasing.” Never mind that he made me ashamed of my body for years. Never mind that I was told, as a very young child, repeatedly, that I had “led him on,” that it was my fault, that I should have just “stayed away from him.”
I think the stories we hear about in the news are the absurd ones—out-of-control administrators suspending kindergarten children for hugging, just like they suspend eight-year-olds for cutting their apples with pocket knives. These stories seem to be used to poo-poo stories of actual, often long-term, violations.
I had one boy, in the fourth grade, who was a complete bully and tried some of that stuff with me. He was really big and really fast and mean and mentally pretty slow. Unfortunately, we were neighbors and so walked the same route home. Fortunately, most of the other kids in our neighborhood were my cousins, so he didn’t get too many chances to mess with me. Except for one time–it was my 9th birthday and I was rushing home to help mom with my cake and he caught me ahead of the other kids. He got some huge weed and started whipping me with it, really hard, so that I had welts pretty much all over my body, and I couldn’t get away. Eventually the other kids caught up to us and my younger sister kicked his ass (I wasn’t much of a fighter, but she always was and she pretty much always took care of bullies for me). And then my dad ‘had words’ with his dad and it never happened again.
Other than that, though, I had a pretty good grade school experience and even with that, I don’t think I ever experienced anything like sexual harassment at that young age. Just your regular, run of the mill bullying. I always chalked his behavior up to his being an asshole and being kind of slow, and I haven’t thought of it in years now.
Once I got to junior high, though, all bets were off and the harassment was horrible. For me and just about every other girl I knew.
Oh my god, I want to vomit after reading that. I am so sorry, especially because your own mother was unsympathetic.
i think it’s really important to call kids out on these behaviors- and not just for the protection of their victims. a child in first grade engaging in acts like that has probably learned them from his own abuse. either way, an adult should talk to the child in question.
perhaps “charging” them isn’t the solution- but there needs to be some means of dealing with it that protects the other children and helps the bully to understand and change his actions… because if we don’t get kids to understand their actions now, they will someday be adults who behave inappropriately- and that’s an opportunity for change we cannot afford to miss.
That’s a really interesting story with a shocking twist at the end. Thanks for sharing it.
I have some half-formed thoughts about whether and how the sexual harassment of young girls is related to bullying of young boys as well, but I think I’d better sleep on it right now, I think I’ve used my brain up for the evening and I’d just end up saying something stupid.
I had a boy after me like that in first grade. I don’t really remember a lot of the specifics now, but he was always trying to kiss me and at least one time he didn’t let me go back in the classroom after recess and held me down on the ground. He was the biggest kid in the class and I had no way of fighting back. I remember at the time being more upset about looking delinquent for not coming in on time than the kissing. I think I told my teacher, but I’m not sure what she did or didn’t do, but that particular class was a mess with 7 kids having to be removed from their homes by social services. There were a lot of kids with behavioral issues of all sorts so she probably had her hands full.
I also told my mom though. My mom volunteered in my class once a week and she somehow took the kid aside and told him in her scary serious mom voice that he was going to leave me alone or she was going to “get him”. And that was it. He didn’t have anything to do with me from then on.
I wonder now if my mom could have gotten in trouble for threatening a 7 year old. She wasn’t like, “I’m going to kill your puppy” or anything, but it was probably pretty scary for him. But I needed something to happen so I could feel safe at school again and that worked. That jackass kid could live with a little fear in his heart in return for my safety and well being. And it just proved once again that my mom is a total badass who gets shit done and apologizes for nothing.
ElleDee, your mom is a badass who did what Lisa’s mom should have done.
And this is why if I ever had a daughter, she would be taken to self-defense classes and given mace as soon as remotely feasible.
Antigone: Yep, the first article I linked to said there are 75000 students in each grade level in that district. Obviously it’s not some kind of epidemic.
Sabotabby: You inspire me to write a post about the wildly effective tactic of “minimalization” that is so often used against feminist issues. Probably the one that’s most familiar to everyone is the “sense of humor” meme.
Pepper!: Yeah, that was part of the whole problem–Drew escalated with me over a period of three years. He could have been stopped at any time prior to that, and not in a way requiring police intervention, either. Just a simple school policy.
Ginger: (sigh) My mom…that’s a whole set of issues in of itself. I honestly think that she sort of was refusing to really listen to me, because she felt guilty because she couldn’t be home when I got home from school so there was nothing she could do so she didn’t want to deal with it.
Thanks for writing this.
I hate it hate it hate it when adults ignore kids’ concerns, tell them to take it or ignore the agressor, or, apparently, chastise them for tattling. The fuck?
Of course, it’s even better for girls, because the pigtail-pulling narrative is so, so prevalent. I’m sure that when you announced that Drew was your boyfriend, any adult in hearing range thought it was just so cute. “Aww, they were fighting because they liked each other!”
Excuse me. Vommit.
Yeah, a damn thing NEVER happened when I got harassed in school, ever. The one time I went to authorities (by which I mean the principal) about it, I had a class where the teacher was on his last year before retirement and he was just literally sitting out the days until he had to be gone. The class was a free-for-all. I got told they couldn’t do a thing to make the teacher enforce well, anything.
All things considered, I have been pretty lucky on the sexual harassment scale in life- pretty low so far, but who knows how long that will last.
This story astonishes the hell out of me, though. I shudder to think how this would have gone down at an age where putting out was more likely.
There was an episode of Burn Notice on recently where a female undercover DEA agent enlists Michael (ex-spy, now sort of a PI) to help her because her target for her case has now started stalking her and is convinced she’s his girlfriend. (She’d rather bust him than get pulled from the case.) There’s one scene where Raul finds out that Michael’s been calling Sophia’s cell phone and calls Michael over while he’s holding a gun to Sophia’s head. Michael manages to convince Raul that he was trying to get some kind of info out of Sophia and “she wouldn’t give you up.” Sadly, it seems like the safest way of dealing with sickos is to act like the world is their reality.
…just… wow… that just shouldn’t happen to anyone.
Thankyou for helping me frame some thoughts of mine, along a similar (thankfully less sinister) line.
And I am so glad that you realised that manipulating men’s feelings is what you were trained to do, not what you have to do. You’re damn smart.
While I cannot specifically relate to the horrors that you endured, I lived through my own specific horrors.
As a young child (and continuing into today), I was always tall and gangly, with the physical anatomy that was more visible than most dummies used in biology classes. I was radically thin. This was more of a confluence of two family trees where both parents were on the naturally thin side and my genes just grabbed both ends.
Now, this seeming preternaturally thinness, coupled with always being at least a head taller than classmates also went along with a shyness that bordered on being aloof. I didn’t understand how to relate to people and spent most of my time reading books or drawing and doodling. I counted myself as relatively intelligent because I never had to work hard to achieve respectable grades. This further distanced me from the rest of the class population. Inevitably, this led to a collective and continued harassment by people on both sides of the sexaul boundary. While the boys were more physical about their attacks, the girls used a combination of psychological warfare as well as using their sexuality (later when it became an issue) to cause further problems for me. There were few punches pulled when it came to humiliating me, whether it was the giggling of girls pushing one another and teasing each other about how they’d like to kiss me while visibly turning green at the prospect to the girls mimicking a spraying of repellant or cleansing spray whenever they were forced into physical contact with me.
The final straw happened during 8th grade graduation practice where the boys and girls sitting directly behind me started to pull my hair out and comparing the size of the clumps and trying to get more out. I’d learned early on that complaining did little to make a difference. My father expected me to fight back while my mother would make an entreaty to an indifferent school administration, never going any further. So, for the first hour of practice, I endured sitting there, clenching my fingers and teeth while the whispers behind me and occasional tug of hair would cause me to wince and silent tears would fall. It wasn’t until I heard a remark about seeing blood in my hair that I finally broke and ran out of the auditorium. Of course, I was immediately accosted and the tears merely confused teachers.
The worse part came when I was forced to wait on the “Principal’s Bench” with my tormentors while the administration inside decided what to do. The kids next to me continually asked, “If it hurt you so much, why didn’t you just say something? I would have stopped.” Even when confronted with evidence of clumps of hair and tears, my tormentors were not punnished. I was grilled and painted as an enabler of my own torment with questions like, “Why didn’t you say something when it started? We would have helped you!” By then I was now angry, at my tormentors but, more at the school staff who blissfully ignored the warning signs or subtly enabled their favored children (there was a teacher who was not so subtle about encouraging the bullying of me). I lashed out and yelled at the administration and was sent home.
The simple truth of the fact was that the administration felt that this sort of behavior was natural child behavior and that punnishment for something that was “normal” was inappropriate. The tormentors involved were chided but nothing changed except for me being phsycially separated from the rest, further marking my separation.
The truth of the matter is that adults look at children differently than they are. Children are far more like adults than most people would like to think, with a single biological exception: Children have yet to develop their brain to be able to make truly informed and rational decisions. Because bullying is often seen as an extension of the natural child relationship, adults enable them by not properly training the behaviour out of bulies and by frustrtrating victims with often useless reassurances. The system, as they say, is broke.