Tag, you are SO it, Baby.
9 year-old Justin Pardee has been suspended for three days for sexual harassment. Sexual harassment. 9 years old. Say what?
Kids play, or foul play at recess? School Superintendent Ed Favolise tells News Channel 8 no teachers actually witnessed the tag game. He says the girl told her teacher later in the day Justin had touched her backside twice during recess.
In a statement Favolise said “the incident violates our zero tolerance policy. The punishment fits the crime. After a thorough investigation we found cause to suspend the young man. That sort of behavior is inappropriate and we do not condone it.”
The kids were playing tag and Justin tagged her on the butt. You could say it’s inappropriate touching and maybe take Justin aside and talk to him about it but to call this sexual harassment is patently ridiculous.
Brandy Salvatore’s son has grown up with Justin. She’s overseen countless tag games between the boys and says innocent accidents can happen during the recess runaround.
“It’s tag, that’s what happens,” she said. “You graze a behind, you graze an arm. You’re just chasing them and taggin them. He’s too young to even know what that is — grazing a butt. He doesn’t even know what that is.”
The families have met with the principal to talk about the punishment. The Pardees will now be getting a lawyer to try to expunge Justin’s record. If they’re unsuccessful he’ll be heading into 4th grade as a known sexual predator.
(Tip credit to Genie Rose and Kimberly Swygert)
Hate to say it, but all parents today know about loony zero tolerance policies and the idiots who enforce them unless they live in a cave (and if they do, they probably don’t send their kids to public school anyway).
It’s almost too tempting to say that if you send your kid to a school with these policies, you deserve what you get.
Well.. welcome to America.. the land of free and… oooops.. no.. sorry, wrong century..
(greets from the old europe..)
Chances are a 9 year old DOES know that there is something about the buttocks that make it a do not touch area.
But sexual harassment? Little boys have been harassing little girls (and vice versa) for millenia, but it is GENDER harassment at this age level.
A 9 year old will smack a girl on the behind not as a sexual statement but because they believe (as my peers said back in the Fifties) that girls are icky and have cooties. Girls would retaliate because they believed boys were doo-doo heads and stupid.
In other words, it’s nothing sinister, just kid stuff.
I disagree, Bettina. It’s one thing to read that the school has a No Tolerance to Sexual Abuse policy. It’s quite another to find out that this means a 3rd grader who swats somebody on the butt during a game of tag will be viewed as a sexual aggressor.
As Brian pointed out (and as the one source in the article stated) this is normal stuff. No normal person would think that a zero tolerance to sexual harrassment policy would apply to something like this.
It may be reassuring to a very dim parent to see that a school has a ‘zero tolerance for sexual harassment’ rule, but, to me, such a rule creates many more problems than it solves:
Flirting becomes ’sexual harassment’ if one party objects.
Boys (specifically) become extremely vulnerable to blackmail by the girls (’he touched me’)
It brings the rule of law/authority into an interpersonal situation where people need to be able to work things out for themselves. Why do we need a specifically ’sexual harassment’ clause and why does it need to be ‘zero tolerance?’ Surely a sensible school staff member should be able to enquire whether the incidents have been ongoing, etcetera.
Zero tolerance just again seems to mean ‘zero judgement = fixed penalty’ - and the students, knowing this, can and will use this to their own advantage, power-playing the system, using the administration to suspend/expel nerds, geeks, the unpopular simply by pointing the finger.
It’s not healthy.
Jim, then I guess a lot of school officials are not normal people. Either that or they are too lazy to exercise any judgment. Unfortunately, their lack of desire in exercising judgment in individual cases can destroy a kid’s academic career, but they just don’t care one way or the other. Kids are expendable in their eyes. Parents should be fully aware of school policies and how cases are handled in their schools before they subject their children to zero-tolerance/zero-brains school officials. A kid can make an honest mistake and be ruined for life.
Today’s public schools are not the best places for boys (or girls for that matter) to be today under zero-tolerance and feminazi school officials (both women and “men.”) Some of my relatives realize this and send their sons to all-boys schools. They read the newspapers and know what’s going on. There is no way in hell they are going to jeopardize their sons’ futures so a school official can look as if he/she is actually doing something about school violence at their sons’ expense.
Harvey: Sort of reminds you of Nazi Germany with their “snitch” culture, doesn’t it?
Public schools are sick and dangerous places to be today.
Oh, I agree that this sort of idiocy is becoming far too prevalent from school officials. That’s why I started this site after all. I just don’t think we should fault the parents for not anticipating the ludicrous. Keep the blame where it belongs - on the people fomenting these ridiculous decisions.
“ublic schools are sick and dangerous places to be today.”
Dangerous…yes, o yes very.
Sick? No that is a gender specific private Catholic school system where morals get overlooked for athletic and academic reputation to give the guise of “Value” and “Unity”. What’s the sick part? The sickest of all.
Educators are only as good as the person in the body, their payrate/religion/reputation are meaningless.
Of course all this is already known, what are we really doing to stop any of this? A little bit counts, but not enough does nothing.
I suppose I don’t find this any more stupid than the rules at my son’s middle school. I swear this is true! I chaperoned a class field trip with his class, and afterwards, I commented that one girl in his class was really cute, and he told me he couldn’t really say. Why? They aren’t “allowed” to look at the opposite sex, because it’s harassment. These are 13 and 14 year olds! Does the school really think they aren’t *looking* at each other?!?!? This is absolutely asinine!
Well, check the student handbook and see what other forms of asininity the school promulgates. Gee, I thought that public schools (as opposed to home schooling) were bastions of socialization. Can guys at least ask a girl to a school dance? LOL.
I wonder what kids must think of their schools and the people who run them. Not much, I imagine.
If the kid really was only tagging the girls on the butt because they were playing tag, discipline for this regarding it as sexual harassment is ridiculous. BUT I must say that as a criminal prosecutor, I have handled sex crimes cases in juvenile court which sadly enough involved some very young children. There are some sick kids out there and a 9-year-old is absolutely capable of committing a sex crime, although it’s rare. I had one case where a nine year old forcibly vaginally raped a six-year-old girl. I had another case where a nine-year-old and ten-year-old dragged a smaller boy into the bathroom and anally penetrated him with a sharp pencil. Most of the time, it has been the case that juvenile sex offenders learn the behavior at home. Most of them were sexual abuse victims themselves before they went on to abuse other kids. As far as the butt patting thing, I had one case I can think of with butt patting as a form of sexual harassment. But the case also involved multiple incidents of butt and breast touching of little girls, which made them cry. The kid, who was 10 or 12, had been warned by the principal several times and just kept touching the little girls on the butt and trying to get up their skirts. He clearly knew what he was doing was wrong, and that he wasn’t supposed to touch the little girls in their private places. So, basically, I am in agreement with you that zero tolerance is idiotic, and you have to judge each case on its own facts. However, you shouldn’t assume what a child is capable of based on age alone.