Montclair State University Sexual Harassment of High School Girls Paper Elective Assignments include readings, podcasts, films, local events, and projects

Montclair State University Sexual Harassment of High School Girls Paper Elective Assignments include readings, podcasts, films, local events, and projects from which you may select according to what interests you the most. Each item listed on one of the pages below a separate Elective Assignment. Each week in this class you should select one item from one page and write at least 400 wordsin which you (1) summarize the content, (2) explain what it added to your understanding of the issue, and (3) tell what questions you had about the piece (things you found hard to understand or disagreements you had).Follow the links below to find Elective Assignments relevant to these topics: Title: “Walking through walls: The sexual harassment of high school girls.”
By: Larkin, June,
Published in: Gender & Education, 09540253, 1994, Vol. 6, Issue 3
ABSTRACT: For most females, crude language and other forms of sexually harassing behaviour are part of
the fabric of our daily lives. To date, however, our focus on sexual harassment has been limited primarily to
the experiences of adult women in academic and work place settings. What has not been explored is the
prevalence of sexual harassment in schools and the way it interferes with young women’s education. Equal
opportunity programmes are of limited use if, for example, we urge female students into traditional male
courses but we neglect to consider the hostile climate they encounter there. In this study I explored young
women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the setting lauded as their gateway to opportunity: school.
Based on their testimonies I make recommendations for educators who are committed to making high
school a more equitable place for female students.
In the following excerpt from her book Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood captures the stark reality of everyday
life for many high school girls.
Stunned broad, dog, bag, and bitch are words that apply to girls as well as worse words. I don’t
hold these words against them. I know they are another version of pickled ox eyes and snot eating,
they’re prove it words boys need to exchange to show they are strong and not to be taken in . . .
I don’t think any of these words apply to me. They apply to other girls, girls who walk along the halls in
ignorance of them, swinging their hair, swaying their hips as if they’re seductive, talking too loudly and
carelessly to one another, fooling nobody; or else acting pastel, blank, daisy-fresh. And all the time these
clouds of silent words surround them, stunned broad, dog, bag, and bitch, pointing at them, reducing them,
cutting them down to size so they can be handled. The trick with these silent words is to walk in the spaces
between them, turn your head sideways, evade. Like walking through walls. (Atwood, 1988, pp. 244, 245)
For most females, crude language and other forms of sexually harassing behaviour are part of the fabric of
our daily lives. To date, however, our focus on sexual harassment has been limited primarily to the
experiences of adult women in academic and work place settings. Educational researchers in Britain and
the USA are beginning to explore the problem of sexual harassment in schools (see for example, Jones,
1985; Halson, 1988; Herbert, 1989; Stein, 1993) but there has been little discussion about the way this
behaviour interferes with young women’s attempts to get an education. Equal opportunity initiatives are of
limited use if, for example, female students are urged into mathematics and science fields but we neglect to
consider the hostile climate they encounter there. In this study I explore young women’s experiences of
sexual harassment in Canadian schools and I examine the deleterious effects of this behaviour on their
education. Building on the testimonies of young women I suggest how educators can make high school a
more equitable place for female students.
Why Focus on Schools?
I recognise, of course, that young women’s experiences of sexual harassment are not limited to schools;
these students were also harassed on the streets, in public places, and in their part-time jobs. But the
harassment they experienced at school set a precedent for the type of behaviour they expected to encounter
elsewhere. After all, school was the nucleus of their adolescent lives: the place where they came to increase
their life opportunities. As one student put it, “If you get treated badly here, you know you can expect to get
the same thing in public”. Being harassed at school teaches young women to accept this behaviour as an
inevitable component of their everyday life.
Sexual harassment and other forms of violence against women are the logical products of a society in
which females are generally devalued, reviled, and mistreated. If unchecked, these misogynist attitudes
seep into our schools and breed a new generation of male abusers. Young men soon learn that acting out
their contempt for women is a way of confirming their own manhood (Frye, 1983). When the sexual
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harassment that young women experience at school is tolerated, educators contribute to the reproduction of
a patriarchal society in which men frequently use violence to express their sexual domination over women.
Halson (1988) has written that:
Schools help to reproduce, rather than to change the existing imbalance of power between men and women
in different ways, not least by failing to recognize the extent to which young women are subjected to sexual
harassment, by failing to note the significant impact which these experiences have on their lives and
personalities [and] by failing to intervene. In these circumstances young women can cope as best they can
in the full and certain knowledge that many of the boys and men with whom they come into contact behave
with disrespect, contempt and violence towards them and this is considered normal. (p. 141)
One reason that sexual harassment has received so little attention in schools is the difficulty in
disentangling harassing incidents from what have come to be accepted as typical male-female interactions.
However, educators are beginning to consider how males’ diminishment of young women contributes to the
decline in self-esteem and career aspirations that female students experience over their high school years
(American Association of University Women, 1990). In her work with adolescent girls, Carrie Herbert
(1989) has suggested that:
sexual harassment may be one reason girls become disenchanted with school . . . unwanted sexual attention
or confusing sexual attention which [is] defined as flattery but [makes] them embarrassed or angry may be
one of the reasons for girls’ lack of achievement. It has been documented that between the ages of thirteen
and sixteen some girls in school lose confidence, become more passive, publicly contribute less in class and
generally lose their eagerness to participate . . . (p. 37)
Clearly, in our efforts to provide equitable education for female students, we have neglected to consider a
primary factor that impedes their academic success. As some educators are suggesting, sexual harassment
may be “the key to unlocking the whole debate on inequality of education for girls” (Brunswick Secondary
Education Committee, 1982, p. 12) because it is one of the most powerful forces acting against young
women.
The Study
The students who participated in this study were from four Canadian high schools located in urban, rural
and small-town settings and represented a variety of racial, cultural and economic populations. In each
school, the administration had expressed an interest in educating students about sexual harassment and
other forms of violence against women and were supportive of those female students who volunteered to
participate in the project. The study was designed to provide the students with a variety of ways to express
themselves and included three components: journal writing, group discussions and individual interviews.
Considering the backlash experienced by adult women who have dared to label certain forms of males’
behaviour as sexual harassment (see for example, Mcintyre, 1986; Ramazanoglu, 1987), I believed that a
journal might be a safe place for young women to express and reflect upon what they were choosing to
record as sexual harassment. I also believed that the process of keeping a journal, coupled with reflection
on their comments during group discussions, would prepare the students for their individual interviews.
While interviews are considered by many to be the essence of qualitative research (Roberts, 1981; Bogdan
& Biklen, 1982) they are limited somewhat by the short period in which the interview is conducted. In this
study, the students had 4 months to think about their experiences of and perspectives on sexual harassment
as they recorded incidents and thoughts in their personal journals. They also met on at least four occasions
to share and discuss their journal entries with other female students. I believed that their interview
comments would therefore be reflective, as opposed to spontaneous, responses to the questions I posed.
More importantly, I hoped they would develop a way of thinking about sexual harassment that was
embedded in their personal experiences because young women’s voices were absent from the current
discussions on this issue.
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Approximately 60 students participated in the study in at least one way. Most attended the group sessions;
some also kept journals and/or agreed to be interviewed. Although the students varied in age, I only
interviewed students who were 16 years of age or older because I wanted to assure the students that the
information they shared with me would be confidential. I could not offer this assurance to students under
16 because I would be legally obligated to report any incident of abuse they might disclose during our
interview. In total, I interviewed 25 students.
I had assumed, as I developed the study, that many young women would have a limited understanding of
the range of sexually harassing behaviour. This assumption was based on the work of other feminist
researchers (see for example, Kelly, 1988) who had found that women tended to consider the more
common forms of sexually harassing behaviour as ‘normal’ or ‘typical’ males behaviour and not as sexual
harassment. My first task, then, was to give young women the opportunity to identify the harassing
behaviour that permeated their school lives.
Naming the Problem
Prior to their involvement in the study, most of these young women had adopted the popular and
contradictory notions of sexual harassment as an extreme form of violence (i.e. ‘rape’) or a trivial and
harmless act (i.e. ‘no big deal’). Many students had considered the more common forms of sexually
harassing behaviour to be just ‘typical’ male behaviour, or as Jessica put it, “just guys being guys”.
Through their discussions with other young women in the group setting the students realised how often
they were sexually harassed and how their experiences of sexual harassment were similar to those of other
female students. Alison explained that:
before when I thought about sexual harassment, I used to think it was rape. I wasn’t sure . . . My friend was
telling me about sexual harassment because she heard about the meetings before I did . . . and I told her I
thought it was rape and she said no. And she told me about the meetings and I said well I’ll go because
that’s happened to me a lot.
For many students, the testimony of other young women led them to recall certain behaviour that, until that
point, they had not identified as harassment. These testimonies, however, did not come easily. As facilitator
of the group, my aim was to encourage young women to discuss and interpret sexually harassing behaviour
from their own experience; I did not define it for them. Initially, my invitation for students to share their
experiences of sexual harassment was met with silence. Dora explained in her interview that she had been
“scared to open up” because, until she attended the meetings, she didn’t know “how much it happens to
everyone else and you think people are going to make fun of you”.
Eventually, a young woman would relay an incident that she thought might be sexual harassment. Her story
was often followed by the comment ‘that happened to me too’ and from that point on the stories flowed.
During the course of the discussions most students altered their definition of sexual harassment to include
non-physical acts. Like many students, Jennifer had always thought that sexual harassment was ‘molesting’.
In her words: “I never thought of it as being vocal”. When I asked the students in their interviews how they
would previously have labelled the more frequent forms of verbal harassment, they used terms that
included: ‘bugging’, ‘teasing’, ‘flirting’, and ‘annoyances’. Helen simply stated that she had considered such
behaviour “just a fact of life”.
The students identified three factors that contributed to their normalisation of males’ harassing behaviour at
school: (1) the frequency of the behaviour; (2) the way it was interpreted by others, particularly the male
harassers; and (3) the fact that the topic of sexual harassment was seldom, if ever, discussed at school.
In terms of frequency, the young women had come to accept as natural those forms of harassment they had
experienced on a regular basis. Some indicated that this behaviour was part of the backdrop of their
everyday life. Fatima explained it this way:
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You don’t even think about it really . . . because it happens all the time . . . it’s a part of life . . . it’s like
you’re walking down the street, someone whistles at you . . . it’s as if it’s natural to do that and if somebody
doesn’t do that then something’s wrong. . . . It’s like, say it rains every day and then it doesn’t rain, it’s like
‘Wow, it didn’t rain’. It’s like whistles. . . . It’s there all the time, [you] don’t even pay attention to it . . . it’s a
part of life.
The second factor that limited young women’s ability to identify sexual harassment was the way the
behaviour was minimised by others, particularly the male harassers. Many of the young women found that
their feelings when harassed contrasted sharply with the perpetrators’ assertions that this behaviour was
simply ‘a joke’. However, with no external validation that they had been violated, the young women would
begin to question their own visceral responses and attempt to take on the perceptions of others. As Ruth
explained:
Before, you know it would bug me but I didn’t show it . . . everybody was laughing so I had to laugh . . . I
didn’t know about sexual harassment.
The third reason that the young women considered the harassing behaviour of males as normal was school
officials’ failure to address the problem of sexual harassment. It followed, then, that many students had no
way of naming the abusive behaviour to which they were routinely exposed. The problem was compounded
when teachers failed to respond to harassing incidents. For example, one student who complained about
male students who continually lifted up her skirt in class was told to return to her seat and stop interrupting
the lesson. After that, she stopped wearing skirts to school: “I only wear trousers, I tell you”. Another
young woman had to endure a male student putting his book down her trousers and making suggestive
comments while the teacher looked on. In her words, “What can you do when the person in authority
doesn’t do a thing about it?”
I want to clarify here that it is not my intention to blame teachers for the sexual harassment that goes on in
their schools (unless, of course, they are perpetrators) but to emphasise that they need to acknowledge and
confront it, for although these students had been unable to label certain acts as sexual harassment, many
claimed this behaviour had always had an impact on them. As Tanya put it: “It drove me crazy”.
Hearing the stories of other young women in group discussions allowed the students to broaden the
parameters of what constituted sexual harassment and who could be sexually harassed. In recognising, like
Clare, that “everybody had something in common”, the young women began to see sexual harassment as a
general problem they all shared. In the process of connecting their personal meanings to the term ‘sexual
harassment’, they began to identify as harassment behaviour they had previously been unable to separate
from their ordinary interactions with males. According to Tanya:
This has just totally opened my eyes. I feel like I have been walking around blind while all this stuff was
happening around me and I was looking the other way.
Now dearly, for Tanya, “all this stuff’ is not a new phenomenon. It is only recently, however, that she has
been able to label it and so she and many other students ‘tend to notice it more’. These young women had
not been “walking around blind”, but without the power of a name they had no way to make the behaviour
visible. Now they were able to speak out about the behaviour they had experienced as distressing. They
were becoming fluent in the language of their own lives.
The Experiences
All the young women had experienced some form of verbal, physical, and/or visual sexual harassment in
their high schools. Although the perpetrators of the abuse were generally male students, harassment by
male teachers was not uncommon. I always asked the students to specify the gender of the harasser, so they
understood that I did not assume that harassment was behaviour that only male teachers or students could
exhibit. Despite this, no student reported being harassed by a female teacher and female students’
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harassment by female students consisted primarily of graffiti written on bathroom walls. Ironically, when
one student told me about a young woman she observed harassing male students she expressed concern
about the safety of the young woman, not her male targets. It appears that young women’s expression of
sexually harassing behaviour can provide males with a rationale for abusing them.
I know one female . . . who does it with males. . . She’ll go up and grab their rear end. She’ll say things to
them like ‘Hi sexy’, or she’ll ask them ‘What are you doing tonight?’ . . . A few of the guys have actually
come over to her, after she says that. And I’m afraid for her because if she keeps that up she could get in
trouble with the guy . . . He might try something . . . it might turn out to be something bad.
Overall, verbal abuse was the most frequent form of harassment reported, although some students also
relayed incidents of physical and visual harassment. While the accounts recorded here reflect the wide
range of harassing behaviour the young women encountered, I make no claims to have tapped the totality
of each students’ experience. Comments such as ‘I’m just starting to remember all these things’ and ‘So
many things come to mind now that I’m talking’ made by students during their interviews suggest that a
quantitative assessment of their incidents would have been unreliable. One student, for example, found it
difficult to recount specific incidents because they were so frequent. In her words: “You just get used to it”.
In the following section I present the sexual harassment experiences of 25 high school girls. Although the
young women often experienced the various forms of verbal, physical and visual harassment
simultaneously, I have categorised their accounts according to the type of harassment that was most salient
in the overall incident. What follows, then, is the raw material of their everyday school lives.
The Forms of Harassment (1) Verbal Harassment
Verbal harassment was the most common form of harassing behaviour the young women encountered at
school. ‘Put-downs’ by male students and teachers appeared to be integral parts of their everyday school
life. The frequent levelling of words like ‘bitch’, ‘witch’, ‘fucking broad’, ‘douche’, ‘dog’, ‘bimbo’, ‘baby’, and
‘chick’ against these students or in relation to women in general often occurred in the context of allegations
that women were inferior to or less capable than men:
In English class we were talking about women’s equality; 50-50 in politics. The guys said that the ‘chicks’
would talk too much; we don’t shut up.
Through expressions such as ‘A woman who makes $40,000 a year is a rich bitch’, female students were
warned that even the successful woman (in the conventional sense) is not immune to males’ verbal
degradation. Similarly, comments such as ‘Women don’t play basketball. It’s a man’s sport’ were used to
remind young women of their perceived weak…
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