I thought it might be helpful to see what an actual HS handbook says about this type of thing. I did a google search of “high school handbook” as many schools publish their Code of Conduct, etc. on school websites. This was the first non-amazon hit: Murray County High School. Section 7 deals with Physical and Verbal Abuse. Obviously the rules will vary from school to school.
To me, it looks like the action falls under 7.4, so a 5-day in school suspension and notify parents. It might fall under 7.3 too, as an “agressive behavior” but we’d need to know more about the circumstances. If so, the punishment is the same but with “possible police action,” so clearly the school reserves the right to call the police or not.
Based on Post 44 by Randy Seltzer and given the info we have, it doesn’t seem to me like this “shorts-check” meets the definition of sexual assault.
If the parents are not happy with the punishment, they can always notify the police themselves.
Wait! Wait! Wait! I think we are all ignoring a vital piece of information!
Did he start singing “I see London, I see France, I see Susie’s underpants!” after the pantsing occurred? Because then it’s physical and verbal sexual assault.
Seriously though, we’ll never come to an agreement over what should happen because what happened directly after the pantsing is a mystery.
Even if we know exactly what happened, we may still not come to agreement. Looking at those laws and regulations, it seems like there’s a significant amount of wiggle room for interpretation. I can see valid reasons for calling it 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5.
Or before. Was she daring him to or has this guy been tormenting the girl for some time? Did she pants him last week and this is revenge, or was this a completely random act?
The point is that the circumstances matter and that’s why it’s clear to me that schools build in room for judgement.
Kudos for looking to actual school handbooks. Looks like under 7.3 or 7.4, this particular school imposes a 5 day ISS. Maybe short of expulsion or police notification, but strikes me as considerably more severe than the relatively minimal “one day of detention” response at least some folk advocated.
I find paragraph 7.5 a little confusing. ISTM that you read it to say that sexual harassment and sexual violence EQUAL sexual abuse as defined by state and federal statutes.
I’m not sure it says exactly that.
The precise words are “Sexual harassment and sexual violence may constitute sexual abuse as defined by state and federal statutes.”
In my mind that says that there are specific things that the school considers to be SH and SV - and that there MAY be some overlap between those and what statutes consider SA. ut it also seems to imply that there may be any number of actions that the school considers SH/SV that ARE NOT statutory SA.
Is my reading entirely off-base?
Of course, if it were read the way I propose, it would require a separate listing of the actions that the school considers SH and SV. If nothing else, a good example of the need for precision in drafting policy/statutes.
The age of majority does have to be arbitrary, yes. But when posters on a messageboard talk about ‘adults’ and ‘minors’ they can afford to be a little more realistic. Hell, the law in most countries (and, from a comment above, in Minnesota and possibly some other US states too) isn’t even as arbitrary as that, when it comes to sexual relationships, let alone pranking in a school.
That would be an excellent idea.
Little girl? 16 is not a little girl. You don’t seriously think that an 18-year-old boy pantsing (outer clothes only) a classmate 2 years his junior is the same as an older adult (like the poster you challenged), pulling a bathing costume off a little girl to reveal her childish nakedness, do you? Come on, you can’t seriously believe that.
For a start, nobody’s defending the boy. Nobody’s saying he should get away scot-free. What some people are saying is that sexual assault charges are probably over the top.
If he were actually convicted of sexual assault, that would be on his record forever. Forever and ever. 20 years from now, he could still find it impossible to get work because of pantsing someone in high school - no-one wants to hire a rapist, and that’s what people would think of when seeing ‘sexual assault.’ If he wanted to adopt, then he couldn’t. Odds are he wll have grown up and changed a lot in the meantime, but his life would still be pretty fucked.
Of course, right now he wouldn’t be thinking about that - he might not even care all that much. Give him a long suspension, ban him from the prom, send him to a sexual harrassment workshop - he’ll care about all that and be more likely to actually change his ways, which is the goal, surely?
[quote=“Dinsdale, post:208, topic:494644”]
Kudos for looking to actual school handbooks. Looks like under 7.3 or 7.4, this particular school imposes a 5 day ISS. Maybe short of expulsion or police notification, but strikes me as considerably more severe than the relatively minimal “one day of detention” response at least some folk advocated.
[quote]
I can only see one poster advocating anything as mild as a single detention.
My reading is that this is a clear case of 7.5 under Murray County H.S.'s rules. Leaving the word assault out of it, I don’t find it any kind of a stretch to call it sexual harassment. Try pantsing someone in the workplace of your choice and see what they call it.
That means the next step is to see if the act meets the definition of sexual abuse in federal statutes or state statutes in Georgia (had this in fact taken place in Georgia). In that case, notify the authorities required by statute.
Regardless of federal and state law, follow the Murray County Board of Ed. policies, which define sexual harassment
" Sexual harassment and sexual violence may include but is not limited to:
verbal harassment or abuse;
subtle pressure for sexual activity;
inappropriate patting or pinching;
intentional brushing against a student’s or employee’s body;
demanding sexual favors accompanied by implied or overt threats concerning an individual’s employment or educational status;
demanding sexual favors accompanied by implied or overt promises of preferential treatment with regard to an individual’s employment or educational status;
… A substantial charge against a student in the school district shall subject that student to student disciplinary action including suspension or expulsion.
In any case, if criminal activity is suspected, law enforcement will be contacted as soon as possible. "
This has been a nice exercise for Murray County, GA, but of course the OP’s not located there (or it would be an odd coincidence).
And if your hypothetical daughter DIDN’T say that? What if she cried about it? I’m not trying to be all, “what about the CHILDREN!!!” I’m genuinely asking: what if she was truly upset, crying, etc.? Would you still not “give it anymore thought?”
Ok, if you saw a crowd of kids dicking around in a park and one of them pantsed another, you’d immediately call 911 and report a sexual assault?
“911, what is your emergency”
“I’d like to report a sexual assault at the park”
“Please describe the incident”
“Well, these kids were all hanging around and one kid pulled another kid’s shorts down”
“… and?”
“Then he laughed and pointed while the kid pulled his shorts back up.”
“… and?”
“that’s it, aren’t you going to lock up this sexual predator?”
The funniest part about the “what if it wasn’t at school” idea is that this “pantser” got in trouble precisely because he was at school, and did it in front of an administrator. In the “real world” a bunch of kids horsing around like this would go completely unnoticed, and nobody would call the cops or follow up on it the way a school would.
That has ZERO to do with this question posed in this thread. If the girl is upset, by all means, throw the book at the prankster. But she has to be the one to decide to press charges. As far as punishment from the school goes, this is not something that should result in expulsion or out of school suspension.
I think the 5 days of in school handed down is fine, although if I was the principal it would have been considerably less.
Definition of Sexual Abuse from the Georgia Code, Title 19-Domestic Relations, Chapter 15 - Child Abuse, Section 1 - Definitions. I used GA because the HS Handbook I linked to as an example is from a school in GA.
The only item that seems close to me is G since it includes physical contact, but we have no reason to believe that it was for stimulation or gratification.
The GA Code has a whole separate chapter for Sexual Offenses: Title 16 - Crimes and Offenses, Chapter 6 - Sexual Offenses. The only section that seems close to this situation is is Section 22: Sexual Battery.
Still doesn’t fit to me. Yanking down someone’s pants does not require touching “intimate parts”
So, we seem to be left with simple battery; slap the kid with a 5-day in school suspension. If I were the principal I think a letter of apology to the girl would be in order too.
On preview: Harriet the Spry, I don’t think we have any indication that the action was sexually motivated.
Make that happen among adults (and whether the girl was a minor or not - and she was - the boy in question is a legal adult) and at Dio’s mall.
“I’d like to report a sexual assault.”
“Describe the incident”
“A man walked up to a woman at the mall and pulled down her pants.”
Why don’t you go give it a try and tell us if the cops just laugh, or if you get arrested and what the charge is? Then we’d have an answer, at least in your jurisdiction.
Cheesesteak, if I saw a teenaged boy pull down the pants of a teenaged girl in a park, I would in fact call the police. In the description of the situation in this thread, the girl reacted by crying, which would make it even more more of a certainty that I would call the police. That’s the action of a responsible adult. I wouldn’t be screaming anything about “sexual predator,” but that’s no way to act in public.
For sexual harrassment, the motivation isn’t necessarily the factor considered, its the perception. Its a different standard than say - murder (NOT comparing this to murder - but with murder you have to prove they intended to kill - with sexual harrassment you just have to prove that a ‘reasonable woman’ would find the behavior offensive or sexual.)
Could we perhaps treat school-age pranks like this on a case-by-case basis? I see a lot of people citing laws and judgementally saying whether this kid, and all kids who pull pranks like this, should either be put in jail or given a slap on the wrist. I’m completely against such kinds of all-inclusive lawyering. It may be in fact that if this kid did it in school, in that environment it requires little more than a slap on the wrist, but if he did it in a mall, he should be punished harsher. Context matters. If he ended up a rapist in the future, well, pantsing isn’t really going to be a good predictor of that so no one should feel bad they somehow missed catching a monster when he was young. Enough people grow up different than how they were as kids to warrant second-guessing behavorial predictions like this
For Murray County Board of Education’s definition of sexual harassment, all we need is “inappropriate patting or pinching.”
Sure, the act might not have been sexually motivated. Teenage boys are rarely motivated by sex. The thought of it rarely crosses their mind in an average day. If his motivation was clearly something different (say, drawing the act at random from a hat in a game of Truth or Dare) he can argue that in his defense.
Since simple battery looks like a slam dunk, call the police and let them sort the rest of it.