LeBlanc, A. (1992, September). "Harassment in the halls." Seventeen, pp. 163-170.

OVERVIEW

‘Faggot,’ ‘queer,’ girl to guy, guy to girl. ‘I want to bang you,’ said every morning, freshman guy to sophomore girl. Or he spreads his legs wide open in class when you walk in. Snaps your bra strap. So you stop talking, start hitting in the back. You may even forget what made you want to hide in the first place. Contempt and ignorance taken out on you, now it’s taken in.

Rude comments about your period, your thighs, your underarms, your intelligence, the way you walk, the way you smell, the way your voice dips, what you did or did not do with someone Saturday night, the fact that there’s no one at all. It can be when a group of people rate guys or girls when they walk by or rate their features in study hall. Or pushing or shoving or cornering you or pinching. The presence of harassing changes your way of being in the world, the way you do things, where you get to do them, and what you’d like to do. It may change your schedule—you switch a class or even a major to avoid it. Your options shrink—you don’t feel like playing soccer because of what they guys yell at the girls on the field. The harassment feeds your self-consciousness; it changes you. ‘You feel like you’re a car,’ says one seventeen-year-old girl. ‘It’s like we’re all cars in a car show.’

According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Sexual harassment consists of unwanted or unwelcome sexual advances, both physical and verbal.

Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for favors and other verbal and physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when:

Submission to such conduct is made a term or condition of employment,

Submission or rejection of such conduct is used as a basis for employment decisions, or

Such conduct unreasonably interferes with work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offending working environment.

Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 extends protection from sexual harassment to students on the basis of a Supreme Court decision in February 1992. The Supreme Court ruled that under the statute students can sue for sexual harassment—and collect damages. While most judgments in these cases have been small, the potential number of plaintiffs is huge. For this reason, it is likely that sexual harassment in our schools will become a serious disciplinary matter. (Alder, J. with Rosenberg, D. [1992, October 19]. Must boys always be boys? Newsweek, 120(16), 77.)

"Harassment in the Halls" tells the story of Katy Lyle and her fight against sexual harassment at Duluth Central High School in Duluth Minnesota. When Katy was a high school sophomore, a senior guy asked her if she knew what was written about her on the bathroom wall. Katy’s heart sank. That day she began to hate school, and she eventually became afraid to go. She cried every day, and she especially feared the bus. Her home phone began to ring constantly, but when one of Katy’s parents answered it, the caller would hang up.

The second floor boys bathroom at Duluth Central High School housed all kinds of disgusting graffiti about Katy, in what became known as the "Katy Stall": "Katie Lyle is a slut" (they didn’t even spell her name right), "Katie Lyle sucked my d--- after she sucked my dog’s d---," "Here’s Katie Lyle’s number," "Katie Lyle gives good head," and "What are you going to do it with this weekend, Katie?"

Katy says, "It felt like a big knife. I felt totally stepped on. I felt violated almost—that people were writing these things about me, really gross things."

The next week when Katy told her principal, he looked up and down as if she had done something to deserve the graffiti. She began to wonder if she had ever done anything to provoke such horrible treatment.

The school claimed that it removed the graffiti regularly, but that it always reappeared.

Toward the end of her junior year, Katy’s parents contacted Susan Askelin, the former executive director of The Program for Aid to Victims of Sexual Harassment in Duluth. When Susan explained the nature of sexual harassment to Katy—how "It can be as emotionally damaging as physical assault. And you don’t have to put up with it."—Katy’s heart lifted. "In that second Katy suddenly felt different, lightweight. Then the anger came crashing down. The anger was a much better kind of hurt."

Katy sued Duluth Central High School and received $15,000 in damages. The article concludes that the "price of speaking out isn’t as high, usually, as the price of silence. ‘Katy had to speak out for herself to help herself,’ her mother says. Her courage made a difference. As of September 1991, every Minnesota school district had to have a policy on sexual harassment."

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. What is the real issue behind sexual harassment?
2. How would it make you feel to have "gross" things written about you? How might this affect your attitude on life, "your way of being in the world?"
3. Did Katy do the right thing in going to her principal? Who might you go to for help?
4. How might you be able to help someone in Katy’s position?
5. Was it right for Katy to sue the school, although it cost taxpayers’ money and brought negative publicity on the school?

IMPLICATIONS

1. According to Dick Goutal, an area authority on the effects of sexual harassment on young people, essentially every girl in America is affected—to some extent—by sexual harassment. As of 1993, there are no reliable study results published from which one may definitively infer the extent to which young people are affected by sexual harassment.
2. In an article on sexual harassment in the October 19, 1992 issue of Newsweek entitled, "Must Boys Always Be Boys?", schools are encouraged to begin teaching first and second graders that sexual harassment is wrong and subject to discipline. If no one teaches young students that sexual harassment is wrong, how can they be expected to refrain from sexually harassing their peers when they reach adolescence? The hope is that "while there may not be a man today who can honestly say he never spent most of a math period staring at the prettiest girl in his class instead of the blackboard...someday there might be." (Alder, p. 77)

Kelly Lee Negus cCYS