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Brookline Newcomer

Preventing high school rape
starts in early childhood

Published in the Brookline TAB

December 2, 1999






Brookline Police Chief Daniel O'Leary recently received a $150,000 Department of Justice grant, which he applied for last spring after increased reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment by Brookline High School students. Combined with similar efforts of a special town task force, the grant can help clarify to all students that sexual assaults, ranging from unwanted touching in the hallways to violence to Saturday night date rape, are both unacceptable and illegal.

But important as it is, improved policing won't solve the problem. The use of power by boys and men against girls and women is so ingrained in our culture that it won't be ended by a few workshops and arrests. Interventions need to take place long before our kids get to high school. For those interventions to be effective, we'll also have to evaluate our own assumptions and behaviors.

Sexual assault and sexual harassment don't exist in a vacuum. Within the larger society, rape is not an aberration. Though repugnant, it's a logical extension of common behaviors that are not only widely tolerated but often extolled. As a result, assault and harassment cannot be understood, and cannot be eradicated, without taking into account imbalances of power and privilege within traditional male-female relationships. Too many young people continue to act upon sex role expectations that many of their parents struggled to eliminate a generation ago.

Feminism's greatest success may be the changed career expectations of young middle-class women. When I attended Brooklyn College in the late 1960s, with job ads still segregated by sex, my hazy memory is that most of the women majored in teaching or English--teaching if they thought they'd have to work, English if they thought they'd soon be married. That world is gone. Although poor and working-class women still mostly end up in secretarial pools and other traditionally female workplaces, middle-class women today expect to choose careers from among the full range of options, and they expect to work at those careers married or not. The glass ceiling persists, but women know it's illegitimate, and they fight to smash it.

Yet some expectations have changed less.

I'm reminded of a young college student of mine a few years ago who wrote an excellent paper describing how she had changed her interests to adapt to a succession of boyfriends: With the jock she went to football games, with the scholar she studied at the library, with the film buff she saw movies. She had never before considered that her relationships might become more egalitarian--that a boyfriend might adapt to her as much as she adapted to him. Ironically, rather than use her new insight to alter her relationships, she wrote of her relief upon reading in the textbook that women routinely adapt to their men. It's expected.

I'm reminded also of my daughter in a Brookline playground just last spring, matter-of-factly informed by two five-year old boys that they did not play with girls. She'd first encountered that response the year before, when her best preschool friend stopped playing with her except when they were alone, because he had learned what other boys expected. She encounters it often now. Her defensive overreaction--"Boys drool, girls rule!"--doesn't really mask the hurt.

My point should be clear: traditional sex role expectations remain strong. With children learning about male privilege on the playground and in their homes, with early learning reinforced by a culture that makes male power and sexual aggression seem sexy, many high schoolers will consider harassment and even rape normal and unremarkable. According to O'Leary's report to the selectmen, many BHS women students were angry last year at one victim for reporting her attacker--because she willingly went with him to a remote location; others said the victim could not have been raped because she wasn't beaten. That both girls and boys believe these myths after more than twenty years of feminist critique is astonishing and disheartening.

Fortunately, the task force on high school rape and harassment is not the only task force. There's also one on bullying and teasing in the younger grades; parallel attention is given to values such as respect. That's a start. But perhaps we need another task force, one focused explicitly on sex roles and other assumptions learned long before high school, even before kindergarten. That's a difficult place to intervene, a politically touchy place, but that's where male power begins.


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