ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070127
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PEGGY ORENSTEIN
THE MEDIA have been having a field day with the story of little Johnathan Prevette, the bespectacled latter-day Georgie Porgie who kissed a girl and caused an outcry.
Johnathan, a first-grader who lives in Lexington, N.C., was suspended for pecking a female classmate on the cheek. Within hours, the news of his punishment had rocketed around the world.
It was on the nightly news. It was in newspapers as far away as Japan. It was on Tom Snyder. A pundit on National Public Radio, accompanied by strains of ``As Time Goes By,'' declared that he was ``stewing mad'' at the fanaticism of Johnathan's principal, at the suppression of affection among children, at the suggestion that a 6-year-old could harass.
In fact, Johnathan's story was reported and commented on with a level of resounding self-righteousness rarely seen in someone not running for office.
See, the reports implied, things have gone too far.
But what is that silence I hear? Could it be the sound of no one noticing the dozens of girls who endure real, humiliating sexual harassment every day in school?
While we're doling out indignation, how about reserving some for the 13-year-old girl who, in her gym class, runs a daily gauntlet of Packwoods-in-training who stare at her breasts and ask for a drink of milk?
How about a little outrage on behalf of the girl who takes the long way to class to avoid the spot where she was pushed up against a locker, her hands pinioned over her head, and mauled?
The truth is, the story of Johnathan Prevette is not the norm, not by far. The norm is that girls are harassed in school, and their harassers are rarely punished.
In an American Association of University Women survey, 76 percent of 1,600 middle and high school girls had experienced unwanted sexual comments, jokes, gestures or looks at school. Sixty-five percent had been grabbed and/or pinched. More than one in 10 had been forced to perform a sexual act other than kissing.
Girls respond to the hostile environment by not speaking in class, by letting their grades drop, by saying they don't want to attend school at all.
In my own reporting on the lives of teen-age girls, I found that sexual bullying was pervasive, even in schools where the principals were trying to stop it.
At a top-notch suburban school near San Francisco, for instance, eighth-grade girls endured boys who grabbed their buttocks and breasts in the hallways. Girls were regularly called ``slut,'' ``bitch'' and ``ho'' and were entreated to perform oral sex on boys.
The girls told me that their fear of reprisal was much too acute to allow them to speak out against their harassers.
At another middle school, a girl told me she was the manager of the boys' basketball team until one of the players walked up to her and, without a word, reached out and grabbed both of her breasts.
At a third school, a girl told off a boy who had been continually grabbing her rear end. He hit her across the face.
So why are we so quick to extend our sanctimony and our sympathy to little Johnathan and so reluctant to come to the aid of these young women?
Yes, his punishment was inappropriate, but so is what these girls suffer through every day. The reaction to Johnathan's story by the public and the press shows how entrenched the status quo really is. His tale effectively reassures us that dealing with sexual harassment in schools - as suspected all along - is much ado about nothing.
We all want our young people to grow up strong and healthy, to be able to learn together and, eventually, work together and live together, perhaps more successfully than do today's adults. To accomplish that, we need to stop focusing on comforting, if sensational, stories and reckon with day-to-day inequality.
Girls have the right to harassment-free schools. Boys need to learn that mistreating females is not the measure of their manhood; that real men treat women with respect.
Gone too far? It's only when that happens that we'll have gone far enough.
Peggy Orenstein is the author of ``Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap''
- Los Angeles Times
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