Hello rape culture
Since my younger daughter is only 11, I didn’t expect the weight of the letter she brought me that night around 11 p.m., hours after I’d put her to bed.
In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.
Her letter went on to describe a group of boys in her sixth grade class frequently joking about assaulting the girls in the parking lot. She said if any of the girls aren’t sitting with their legs closed, the boys will ask if they want to get pregnant. And if the girls’ legs are crossed, boys from this group often walk by and say, “Spread ‘em.”
This does not give me hope for the future.
Massive failure on the part of the school. Why are they separating boys and girls? Separate the junior sex offenders from the other students.
In our school system, middle school kids are not allowed to use cell phones in school. Any sexual violation like those described is dealt with firmly on the first offense and very harshly on the second offense. The kids are made well aware of these policies (if anything, they’re led to believe there’s less leniency on the first offense). I’m sure there’s a lewd comment here and there, but from what I can tell it’s very rare.
I suppose you could argue it’s oppressive, but kids that age should not have to deal with that stuff (really, no one should, but that’s another topic).
Not allowing it is a HELL of a lot less oppressive than allowing it.
Skeletor, sorry, but why is it the school’s responsibility to parent? Parents have outsourced everything, and seem to see teachers as just another part of the gig economy to do their bidding.
As a student, I fought with teachers over stupid discipline rules, mostly about what to wear and not sitting with girls.
As a parent, I fought with teachers over stupid discipline rules, like “make work” homework and the size of pencil cases.
But should it have come to my attention that my son did anything remotely resembling what these boys do, he would have had me and his mother to answer to. He would have been left in no doubt that this was unacceptable behaviour, and if it was “peer group pressure” he would have been looking for another peer group ASAP.
And don’t say these kids grow up in a different world, each generation faces its own challenges, but good parenting is always the moderating factor.
This needs to be said over and over again – teachers today are expected to be everything – parent, cop, psychiatrist, and best friend come to mind. Teachers barely have to be teachers any more.
That being said, I think Skeletor is also right. It is the responsibility of the school to protect the students from such behavior; the students are in their charge. It should not be the job of the teacher, but there does need to be a policy in place, because if the parents do not do it, someone still needs to act in that protective function to ensure that girls are able to go to school and learn without becoming a target for abuse.
At least some of this is about the internet and the widespread availability of free porn, much of it violent and rapey. Parents are playing a losing game trying to restrict their kids’ access to this stuff because most of them are not as technologically savvy as those same kids.
I’m not trying to sound like an old prude, but my understanding is that there has been an increasing trend in porn to include elements such as choking and binding. And there is some evidence to suggest that what you watch influences what you fantasize about. I don’t know if that is genuinely the case, but it certainly seems like things have gone backwards since I was 11 years old. Or even since my twenties, for that matter. Eh, maybe I’m just an aging GenXer but any man who’d even suggested choking during sex to me as a single woman would not have gotten close enough to try it out.
I will NEVER understand how it’s come to be seen as “prudish” to think sex should have nothing to do with violence or torture or pain. I’ve seen it happen but I continue to think it’s sinister bullshit. Not least because the torture and pain seem to be all inflicted on the woman, for the entertainment of men. Prudish shmudish.
iknklast:
For most of my working life, I was a college and high-school teacher. (Sciences.) My experiences led me to the conclusion that there is an unwritten contract or conspiracy between teachers and students to keep parents as far out of the loop as possible. Both see the parents as a common enemy, who can make trouble.
Parents expect teachers to stand in for them in loco parentis during school/college hours. Parents expect their kids to make best use of their time at school. Teachers thus finish up with a large number of parents wanting to hold them to account. Students usually only two, but at higher intensity. All have understandable motives.
One way out of this is via optional mastery learning. The student is free to leave school and seek a job or other life choice once a certain agreed set of skills has been mastered; to the satisfaction of objective assessors and parents alike.
Otherwise, based on my experience, it will be business as usual; 90% of a high school teacher’s time will be taken up dealing with the 10% of students who do not want to be there.
The Ancient Greeks had the right idea IMHO, at least in part. They did not bother to teach anyone to read until the age of 15 years. (For young women, learning to read was optional: guess why.)
They believed in first, building a sound body. Then build a sound mind. Skills that youngsters struggle with can be rapidly mastered by late-teenagers. So until 15, education was 100% physical education, carried out in a place called The Gymnasium. (Guess why again.)
On the basis of this, they built no mean ciivilisation; which intellectually, militarily and culturally could take on all comers; in its time.
Omar, I’m not going to dispute your experience, but mine has been much, much different. I teach in college (sciences, like you) and the students, parents, and administrators all dogpile the instructors to do all the things the student should be doing, the things the parents should have done, even the things the administrators should be doing. Teachers are expected to be available 24/7, allow students to text them (I don’t text anyone, least of all my students), be best friends, be counselors, be diversity advisors, and to make the courses easy enough for the students to pass without much effort.
Teachers are understandably quite concerned about this state of affairs, but we tend to absorb what is thrown at us and try to turn it into something workable, because the one thing we don’t want to do is refuse to do something and leave the student hanging, even if that something is not part of the job of a teacher, and even if it is outside our skill set. College teachers work way more than 40 hours a week (I suspect K-12 teachers do, too, but I have no experience), and when Larry Summers said (about 15 years ago or so) that the reason there are so few women teaching at Harvard is because women don’t want to put in the 80 hour work weeks, everyone spent their time explaining women to Summers, disputing his statement, etc, but I didn’t see anyone question why are they expected to work 80 hours a week? And it is expected. My schedule is 40 hours a week, I am paid for 40 hours a week, but the schedules are set up in such a way that it is impossible to complete your work in the 40 hour work week, and right now I am on my own, unpaid time (winter break) and working on spring classes because they threw us a curve on deadlines, and made everything due the day we return – by midnight of that morning, 8 hours before we are due back at work.
So, no, I have seen literally not one case of teachers and students conspiring to keep the parents out of the loop, and from what my high school teacher friends say, they are not seeing it either. In fact, parents don’t belong in the college loop, but students frequently bring them into the loop.
And every high school teacher I encountered when my son was in high school bemoaned the fact that the parents were not having a bigger role; they were not trying to keep the parents out, they were doing all they could to bring them in. They solicited my assistance where possible, because my son was…not a problem student…a student who didn’t cause havoc, but who did not do his homework or take his tests or participate in classes, in spite of the fact that he was extremely capable of succeeding. We worked together to try to help him…I have never known a teacher willing to take on that role of keeping the parents out, though many of them would like the parents to be a bit less aggressive on trying to get all attention put to their student at the expense of other students.
Bang on the money – 15 years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues