[barend]

Little children labeled as sexual harassers
Kids dealt with harshly as schools grapple to enforce zero-tolerance policies

WASHINGTON - In his seven years, Randy Castro has been an aspiring soccer player, an accomplished Lego architect and a Royal Ranger at his Pentecostal church. He also, according to his elementary school record, sexually harassed a first-grade classmate.

During recess at his Woodbridge school one day in November, when he was 6, he said, he smacked the classmate's bottom. The girl told the teacher. The teacher took Randy to the principal, who told him such behavior was inappropriate. School officials wrote an incident report calling it "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive," which will remain on his student record permanently.

Then, as Randy sat in the principal's office, they called the police.

"I thought they were going to take me to prison," Randy said recently. "I was scared."

Prince William County school officials would not comment on Randy's case, citing student confidentiality. They said the call to police was the result of a misunderstanding.

Randy is only one of many children to be dealt with harshly as schools across the country grapple with enforcing new zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies and the fear of litigation.

The Virginia Department of Education reported that 255 elementary students were suspended last year for offensive sexual touching, or "improper physical contact against a student." In Maryland, 166 elementary school children were suspended last year for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, 16 kindergartners and 22 first-graders, according to the State Department of Education. Statistics for the District were not available.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23928454/

1. "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive" is not the type of sentence I expect to come from anyone in authority of an educational institute. That's disgraceful.
2. For all the girls I played 'Doctors and Nurses' with as a kid, I should be registered as a sex offender by todays standards
3. Who the fuck is spearheading all this shit? Did someone put something in the tap water that just made everyone retarded?

MEanwhile...
Cops Bust Teens' Root Beer Kegger

Yep... everything's under control.


Thanks to J M HoFmArN for both articles

This post has been edited by barend: 03 April 2008 - 04:38 PM

[Casual]

Christ sakes the bureaucrats are hard at work.

[J m HofMarN]

In Maryland, 166 elementary school children were suspended last year for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, 16 kindergartners and 22 first-graders

How? How the fuck do you suspend a pre schooler? Much less for sexual harassment. Who knows what else they can nail toddlers for.

"That fingerpainting looks vaguely like a vagina. We're sending you up for posession of pornography!"

If I ever have kids, and some dipshit teacher uses the term "zero tolerance" (the wonderful policy responsible for toddlers being charged with sexual assault and with football team members being suspended from sports for drinking out of red cups as in the second story) If any educator ever even uses those words in reference to my child, I'll do my damnedest to pound them unconsious before someone arrives to pull me off.

That's justice. If your preschooler is suspended for sexual harassment the law should, nay, must, allow you to walk up to the offending party and slug them in the nose and then the charges will be dropped. The cops wouldnt mind, because it says in this story that they've been called to this school like 20 times over stuff like this. If they release the recording of the conversation I really need to hear the 911 call.

"Hello, police! A six year old has just smacked a girl's butt. We're going to need all available units, and possibly spider man! Medical help for the girl as well. What's that? She has cooties? Dear god! Get me a hazmat team immediately!"

When I was a kid this didnt happen. When I was in kindergarten I smacked girls butts. Hell sometimes I might have smacked boys butts. No one charged me or any other kid in my class with sexual harassment or homosexuality. We all have butt's, people and if there are two kids smacking eachother it is entirely possible a smack will hit a butt.

I do however remember hearing once, and only once, in all my years in public schools, about a kid who got suspended from kindergarten. I dont think I ever met the guy, and its probably an apocryphal story, but the idea was that he was so bad ass they suspended him from Kindergarten. I dunno, maybe it was just part of his image, but it sure kept people from messing with him.

I'm just glad that the actual judicial system hasn't taken up this line, but I don't hold out hope that this will last too long. No doubt our courts will soon be bogged down in slander suits involving the terms poopy head and dog breath.

[J m HofMarN]

Also, this is possibly the most incredible thing I've ever read. A lot of news stories can be rather shocking, but it really is amazing that an educator could call a six year olds mother and say that he was calling the police on her son for sexual harassment. How the fuck do you do something like that?

Claudia Castro, a preschool teacher in Alexandria, said she was shocked when officials at Randy's school called to say that he was in trouble and that they were calling the police. She later met with the principal and assistant principal. "I told them that what he did was not appropriate. And I have talked to him about it. What I don't understand is how you can make a police report on a 6-year-old. But the principal told me that they were making reports to the police every single day."

Hey, people in the tri state area: Next time you're being stabbed a lot and 911 puts you on hold, you know why.

[barend]

Hey, people in the tri state area: Next time you're being stabbed a lot and 911 puts you on hold, you know why.

Pretty much.

America is going to be the most fucked up place in history when todays children are running it. What kind of message is this sending out there.

[civilian_number_two]

Well yeah, the forst story is asinine, but in the second story it seems that cars were blocking the road and complaints were laid because the kids were actually tring to make it appear as though they were drinking alcohol. According to the quote from one of the organizers, the intent was to make it look like there was alcohol being drunk, to "make fun of the school." I'm not sure what the punchline of that joke is, really. Maybe when you do that, the secret is not to actually do anything even of misdemeaner severity, such as parking cars in lanes of traffic. Maybe the other thing is not actually to admit when it's all over that you were intentionally misleading. Might as well have had girls running away and screaming, and then made fun of everyone who believed that someone was in danger.

Don't agree with the suspension, of course. There's no proof that the kids in the picture were drinking beer. That sort of decision is just folks wanting to show you can't mess with them. I don't know if I think there was any point to the mischief that followed, but I think it's telling that there's no mention of the police filing any charges, and they were the ones inconvenienced by it.

Back to the first story, this is what I think is at play. Nowadays folks seem to think that civil suits should be filed any time you want to get back at someone, for anything. Folks are becoming more and more letigious ove rthe most trivial garbage. My nephew's friend's parents wanted my sister to sign a waiver freeing them of any responsibility for personal injury before they'd even let him into their car to take him with them to the mall. She had to patiently explain that such a waiver actually wouldn't hold any favour in court, and besides, she wasn't going to let her son hang around with adults who felt they could sign away responsibility. Apparently in the wake of such a counterargument they looked at her like she was from Mars.

So I don't like you, or I don't like your kid, or at least I know my kid doesn't like your kid. So I am going to try to destroy your child with erroneous claims and threats of lawsuits. It's an insidious form of violence, and it's all over the place. A teacher friend of mine had a couple of parents corner her with a request to falsify credentials on their daughter's college application. Basically, their daughter had worked on a group project, and they wanted it to be noted that she had been the project leader. The teacher explained that it wasn't that sort of project, that to say there had been a leader would be a lie. So then they started down this path about how something the teacher had said one time might be construed as sexual harrassment. She was stunned, but also way smarter than they were. She asked did they really believe that she had said something sexually harrassing to their daughter, and they were willing to let it go in exchange for complicity in a lie? If that were the case, she suggested, they didn't think much about the safety of their daughter, or worse, they were teaching her that she should use her sexuality to gain advantage over people in authority. Or, on the other hand, were they just making something up in order to get something illegally? She further offered that had her own child been sexually harrassed by a grown woman in a position of authority, and had she known it, she would not, on meeting the harrasser, have spent the first half hour of that meeting discussing irrelevant business. "If I believed that were the case, that's what I would have led with," she said. "Shame on you."

Nevertheless, she still had to explain every detail of the alleged incident and was treated in a guilty-until-proven-innocent manner by the school's administration. It was even suggested to her that she just give the parents what they wanted and that no record would be made of it. So random threats of insane bullshit will sometimes get you what you want; why not accuse a 6-year-old boy of sexual harrassment, if you can find some reason to want to do that?

This kind of thing makes me crazy. I have worked a bunch of jobs and seen some really bogus sexual harrassment claims thrown around just to get back at guys for petty shit. It's no different really from the tactic of trying to get your boyfriend to beat someone up for you, or worse, of trying to get your boyfriend beat up. It's real high school stuff, and apparently loads of adults in North America will never grow out of it.

[Heccubus]

"That fingerpainting looks vaguely like a vagina. We're sending you up for posession of pornography!"

If that was the case, half of my paintings from grade school are probably in a file somewhere, and someone's keeping a watchful eye over me. Looking back, I think about 90% of what I drew as a kid could probably be described as looking like something from the nether-regions of the human body.

[J m HofMarN]

Civ-

...makes me crazy. I have [to]... see... some.... back...[,] guys

Now, you can either use your mod powers to grossly inflate my post count, or it's sexual harassment prison for you. And I don't think its so much the litigious people at fault, though they surely spawned it. It's idiot PTA soccer moms pressuring administrators to make the schools ultra safe, administrators beign afraid of suits from both parties, and then using their marvelous "always work by the rules never use judgement" approach to force this kind of stuff down to the level of the teachers who cant question it, or in the cases of some idiots, just like to "pour their derision on everything we did". This is the same top down all children require the same exact standards thing that brought us the wonder of standardized testing.

As for the kegger deal, I think it was an act of protest theater that is really quite nifty. The kids werent looking for the cops to be called, they were looking to get suspended for being seen drinking from red cups, and to draw attention to their school's policies. I think they did a good job of that and should be commended even if they did waste a bit of police time.. The cops could have been way more cool about it and there should have been no need to administer dozens of breathalyzer tests.

Heccubus- So you were a pornographer and me and Barend were sexual assaulters. Its a good thing people weren't batshit insane when we were in school, and its also rather telling that you didnt grow up to be Larry Flint.

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 04 April 2008 - 11:48 AM

[civilian_number_two]

Well if they were looking to get suspended, so far the article didn't say whether any action was going to be taken. And the kids from the red cup picture were only suspended from extracurricular sports, not school itself.

All that stuff you said about my rant, well yeah, that too. But I think if a popular kid did something of the sort, if the kids didn't have it in for him, or if the teachers and principal at the school didn't have an axe to grind (calls to the police every day?), then I dare say nothing would have happened there. Some cute neighbour walks by and her dog craps on my lawn, and she forgot her plastic bag, and I see it happen, I probably don't worry about it so much. But should you come along and do the same, I don't care if it's only a chihuahua. It's courtroom time, you lawn-soiling bastard!

So on the radio this morning some DJ was playing a tape of something a local MP said at a party 17 years ago. Apparently someone taped this in 1991 and held on to it until now. On the tape he says something about homosexual faggots with dirt under their fingernails (?) spreading disease. It's clearly the middle of a sentence, the folks around him are laughing, and then the sound bite ends, also in the middle of a sentence, without any mention of context (apart from the admission that these are the drunken words of a guy at a party 17 years ago).

So: lots of the usual sorts of people are flipping out and demanding his resignation from politics. None of these people support his party, of course (he's a conservative; his detractors are liberals). He's come forward and said that this was 17 years ago, he was drunk, he has no idea what the context was, but he's deeply sorry and genuinely upset if anyone was hurt by his comments (if anyone was, they should toughen up). This hasn't slowed the saber-rattling much.

There I think is a more clear-cut example of what I suggested above, of political enemies jumping on the flimsiest excuse to try to chase a fellow out of office. There's already a process in place, it's called an election, but these guys are always hounding one another to resign.

The DJ then played a much older tape of Tommy Douglas, patron saint of liberal politics in Canada, saying that homosexuals ought not to be hated, they should be treated, for homosexuality is a mental illness. The DJ made the suggestion that were Tommy Douglas alive today, he would likely not have said that, not only for the political suicide that it might have been, but because he probably wouldn't have felt that way. Common perceptions of homosexuals have changed a lot since his day, and I dare say they've also changed a lot in the last 17 years.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 04 April 2008 - 10:42 PM

[Supes]

These are the sort of things that really make me worried about the general state of the world, not just the United States. We're seeing more law suits here in Australia now than ever before and this same bizarre approach to children is starting to creep into our schools. Parents seem to be less inclined to take responsibility and are foisting more and more of this on to the school teachers. No wonder you can't keep a good teacher in schools these days. I have a sad feeling this one is going to have to run to the fullest of it's stupidity before some sense will again be added back into the mix.

[J m HofMarN]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23986997/

Why has all the retarded news this week involved schools and adults who are less intelligent than the kids in them?

The above link is about a school which had a spirit week or whatever it was called in your area. The kids voted on what event should be had on what day, and for one day of the week they decided to either dress as old people or, shock, horror, the opposite sex.

So a conservative radio show picks up the story and tells the world that the school is behind the kids with whips forcing them into a life of cross dressing and depravity. The article naturally ends with the principal promising not to have another spirit week event.

Jesus, fuck all of these idiots. Education in this country is going to be completely devoid of fun, interesting events, red cups, and, considering the main topic here, most students within a few years. Wouldnt it be great if people left the education of our youth to, ya know, educators instead of cops, anti drinking lobbying groups, lawyers and christian nut jobs?

[Spoon Poetic]

Well I have to admit, it was dumb to pick that as a theme. Of COURSE a bunch of people would be upset at that. They shouldn't have let it be something to vote on, not because it's inherently evil for kids to dress as the opposite sex, but just in smart, preventative thinking so their butts wouldn't be on the line. And now they get no wacky day ever again. Stupid heads. I hate today's grown-ups. What in the heck was going on in their childhoods to make them into the whiny pussies they are today?

[BigStupidDogFacedArse]

Who else felt dirty when their 3rd grade teacher warned the class about the dangers of a parent touching a childs genitals?

Forget teaching our kids proper math, lets just give them the right to sue for harrassment and tell them it's not ok for their family members to play with their privates.

This post has been edited by BigStupidDogFacedArse: 07 April 2008 - 12:22 PM

[civilian_number_two]

I didn't go to school in the days when educators warned children about paedophiles. We were just told that it was weird for adults to be very interested in children who were not their own. We never had it explained why.

Coincidentally, when I went to grade school a soon-to-be-world-famous serial killer was targeting children in my neighbourhood, so parents weren't waiting for the teachers to warn the kids to stay away from strangers.

Crossdressing day was a silly idea, but at least one conservative radio host should have had the integrity to admit that most crossdressers are straight. My resistance to it of course has nothing to do with homosexuality, but with gender roles in general. Like, I get what a guy would wear if he wanted people to know he was dressing as a girl, but what's a girl supposed to wear? Slacks and a baggy top? Isn't that already a viable alternative to lowriders and half-tops? I mean let's face it, unless she's gonna go for a man-tailored suit, a woman is able to dress "as a guy" with no comment.

When I went to high school, I ran for the position of Student Council "Arts" Representative. I wasn't serious about it; my speech was that I wanted to make Art "less gay." I promised to remove the colour pink from the visible spectrum, among other dumb teenager stuff (I was a pretty dumb teenager). I ran for a lot of other positions at the same time, even though one was only allowed to hold one, and I made all kinds of dumb platforms. I was not censured; no teacher even suggested I remove my poster; a few folks commented on how they thought some of it was stupid, others said some of it was funny, most ignored it.

I think parents today ought to have the attitude toward high school extracurriculars that the parents seemed to have in "my day."

[J m HofMarN]

Spoon- I dont think any sane person could have expected a lunatic radio host to get pissed, much less to start a campaign about it. They did this at my middle school, and I'm sure it happens all over the place during spirit week. Sometimes it is funny to dress as other people or things. And no one should listen to these ass clowns anyhow. If a conservative radio host is pissed, but the kids have a good time and enjoy their education for a day or so, I dont see the negative effect on the kids. And hey, kids do normally cross dress, its called dress up, and we've all played it. That means the school isnt allowing them to do anything they havent done plenty of times before or anything that could possibly warp their fragile minds since it's completely voluntary.

But if we're going to ban dress up, there is something else far worse. The bible says that anyone who has sex with an animal must be stoned (and the animal as well!) But what about vile beasts who lurk in carnivals and county fairs waiting to paint the faces of our youth so they LOOK like animals. Youth who might well go home and have sex. You see what I'm getting at? Exactly! Simulated beastiality! And we're letting these people force this on our children! Blargh blargh god blargh blargh family values blargh blargh I should be fucking shot in the face.