Jesus christ. I wish I could be surprised by your comment but sadly, I am not.
taking someone’s clothes off against their will is not a prank.
There was another one going around recently, a young boy was harassing a girl by grabbing her bra (sexual assault) and the watching teacher did nothing and even told the girl to “ignore” it, and the girl ended up punching the boy repeatedly in the face when he tried to take her bra off. The idiotic school tried to put all the blame on the girl until the girl’s mom asked for charges of sexual assault to be pressed and then they suddenly backtracked.
Anyone who says “boys will be boys” is simply excusing inappropriate behavior and promoting “rape culture.”
Pulling down someone’s pants can be a non-sexual prank. It can also be a form of sexual harassment. (Support for both of these claims can be found on Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and elsewhere.)
In the case of a boy doing it to a girl as old as eleven, though, it’s hard to see it as non-sexual.
Even if it is a non-sexual prank, it’s a serious trespass onto another person’s dignity and should be treated as unacceptable.
My son did it to a friend of his (another boy) in middle school as a non-sexual prank. You know what, his intent didn’t matter. Nor did it matter it was his friend. He still got suspended, and there was zero tolerance - there was absolutely no “boys will be boys.”
If “boys will be boys”, then it is logical to say “girls will be girls”. Let’s say a boy pulls down the pants of a pubescent 11-year-old girl. If she were to react by grabbing a pencil and stabbing him in the face, wouldn’t she be reacting only out of the primal fear of rape?
Implicit in the “boys will be boys” notion is that girls shouldn’t react according to their own impulses.
I find this quite believable, and here’s one reason why: I have a friend whose best childhood friend had a stalker for a couple of years; he was a classmate who had asked her out on a date and couldn’t handle the fact that she turned him down. Every time her family went to the authorities, SHE was told that SHE had to stay away from him. :smack: Nobody ever so much as sat him down to tell him to knock it off and leave her alone. Eventually, he brought a gun to school and shot and killed her, and then himself.
This was over 30 years ago, BTW. 
As for “pantsing” someone, there is one situation where it’s done as a prank, and it’s a boy doing it to another boy who has his pants belted under his rear end (which I haven’t seen much of lately, relative to a couple years ago). However, an 11-year-old boy who’s doing this to another girl, in public no less, needs some serious psychiatric evaluation. That behavior doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Story, along with commentary on its dubious veracity, here. Which isn’t to say that this sort of incident never occurs, but rather than the solution is rarely so neat.
The incident, as told by Snopes, almost makes it sound like the mom found it amusing. So much for the kid being punished. BTW, I’ve seen variations of all the stories mentioned in that post.
THIS, however, was NOT made up. I was living in the area at the time and it was a huge story, and rightfully so.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/08/18/missouri.school.rape.claim/
As for why the boy got away with it, some of us wondered if he was a star athlete until it turned out he was a 7th grader when all of this started. That’s a bit young for athletic ability to give one a free pass (and it shouldn’t ever). A possible explanation came when a local TV station aired some footage of the boy being taken into the courtroom; even though he was fuzzied, it was obvious that he was black, and I’m not the only person who figured the district was afraid of being sued for discrimination. :rolleyes:
It absolutely was in New Zealand when I was a kid (as in Primary School age). But you’d only do it with your good mates and of course, it never would have been acceptable for a boy to downtrou (as it was known) a girl. Absolutely not cool.
The thought there might have been anything even remotely sexual about it never, ever entered our heads. I mean, we were like 11, for smeg’s sake. Still playing with GI Joe toys and trying to see who do the raddest skateboard jump (all six inches of the ground) and stuff like that.
I’m not saying someone on the wrong end of a pantsing shouldn’t feel embarrassed or humiliated, but stretching it from “immature prank” to “sex crime” seems to be drawing an incredibly long bow to me, absent any other pertinent circumstances.
Why not? If there is nothing even remotely sexual about it, why does the recipient gender matter? It’s not sexual when done to one of your good mates, but what if one of your good mates was a girl? Still absolutely not cool?
“Haters gonna hate”
I think that was Socrates.
It was more out of the idea drummed into our heads that It Was Not OK To Hit Girls. Nothing sexual about it, just the idea that girls were the Fairer Sex and all that. What can I say? It was the South Island of New Zealand in the late 1980s, basically.
Also: 11 year old boys in my social circle didn’t have Good Mates who were girls. It didn’t work like that back then.
As someone on the receiving end of a “pants down”, I can concur that it was not a fun thing to be deal with.
But it was as far from a sexual assault as an elbow in the face during a soccer match was from grievous bodily harm. Its a discipline issue. Not a criminal one.
Agreed, the punishment would have been much more serious if a guy did it to a girl. The reverse? Nothing would have happened except laughter.
Great analogy. An elbow to the face (let’s leave soccer out of it, with the attendant complications of playing rough sports) isn’t grievous bodily harm, it may be only minor bodily harm, but it’s bodily harm nonetheless. Forcibly taking off a girl’s clothes may not be grievous sexual assault, but it’s sexual assault nonetheless.
I’m not saying cops need to be involved. But I’m saying it needs to be treated as a serious disciplinary issue, not as a lighthearted prank.
Forcibly removing people’s clothes and exposing their genitals is absolutely, unequicovocably a sex crime. In the context of kids it’s minor enough that it should be handled with school discipline and not the legal system, but this insistence that it’s just sweet innocent fun and not sexual at all sounds like willful blindness to me. Especially when we’re talking about 7th graders, who are old enough to get pregnant.
Oh for fucks sake, no one is saying its “sweet innocent fun”. But, amazingly, there is more of a choice than merely “sweet innocent fun” or a “sex crime”.
What next, locking up the participants in school fights for battery? Punishing kids who cheat on tests as fraudsters? Declaring the cool girls cliques guilty of harassment (this I might actually be able to get behind ;)).
Kids do a lot of lousy things in school. And have that done to them. They need to be corrected and punished. Not put in the same level as hardened criminals.
Otherwise it seems to be a failure of parents and teachers since dealing with this is their responsibility.
Wait, who’s talking “hardened criminals”? I thought the original question was whether a schoolgirl was entitled to defend herself.
I for one have not said that all school misbehavior requires law enforcement to become involved. Indeed, I think law enforcement is already over-involved in school discipline.
What I—speaking for myself—am saying is that certain kinds of misbehavior justify a reaction that makes clear that this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated. And that might involve making it clear to a kid that this kind of behavior may very well be punished as a sex crime.
And the criticism in this thread is not because school officials failed to take the most extreme possible steps, but because they actually let the boys off scot free and put the burden on the girls to avoid being attacked.
Interesting username/topic combo. 
I don’t want to defend the practice, but I can’t resist pointing out a few inaccuracies.
First and least, 11 years old isn’t quite 7th grade.
More importantly, pulling down someone’s pants usually reveals their underwear (which can be done for embarrassment comedic value), not their genitals. (Though I don’t know the details of the specific incidents being discussed in this thread. Could there be some confusion over the US vs. UK usage of “pants”?)
Even if the pants-ee were completely em-bare-assed, this needn’t be any more sexually charged than mooning, wherein a person drops his own trousers in an “inappropriate” place. Do you consider mooning someone to be a sexual act?