Teaching respect

Sexual teasing, groping, and even rape are on the rise in Boston's schools. Critics say education is the answer, but school officials seem wary.

by Sarah McNaught

CITYSCAPE

Just after lunchtime on Tuesday, April 6, a 14-year-old girl became the second person this year to be raped by a fellow student in the Boston public-school system.

Sometime between 12:58 and 1:45 p.m., during seventh-period classes, the West Roxbury High School student was allegedly dragged into a locker room just off the gymnasium and digitally raped by 17-year-old Mario Regis and a 16-year-old, both of whom attend the school. The victim, who revealed the attack to a guidance counselor the next day, says she is in a class with the 16-year-old but didn't know Regis personally.

The juvenile was arrested on Wednesday, April 7, by members of the school police's truancy team after they saw him with friends in a cemetery near the school. Regis was picked up the next day. On April 8, the 16-year-old was arraigned in Boston Juvenile Court on charges of rape; Regis was arraigned in West Roxbury District Court on rape charges on April 9. He is being held on $1000 cash bail.

Out of bounds Sexual harassment and assault cover a broad spectrum of behavior. According to the Department of Public Health, examples of unacceptable conduct short of rape and attempted rape include: sexually explicit jokes sexual comments and name-calling (including homophobic name-calling) displaying sexual or offensive pictures ogling deliberately brushing against another person's body touching, pinching, or grabbing at body parts unwanted hugging, kissing, or putting an arm around another's shoulder subtle pressure for sexual activity sexually suggestive gestures or actions

The alleged rape happened just one day after Walter Rack, 18, was acquitted in Suffolk Superior Court of raping a 15-year-old girl at Dorchester High School in December 1997. Rack had been charged with dragging his fellow student by her hair into a bathroom and attacking her, but attorney Robert Stowe of the law offices of Dane M. Shulman, who defended Rack, dismisses the accusation.

"She's now over 238 pounds and wore a man's size 38-42 pants at the time of the incident," says Stowe. "This is a woman who's claiming she was raped and now turns out to be pregnant and she's not even 17. She's apparently promiscuous."

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Boston-area teachers find such sentiments appalling, and the Suffolk County DA's Office is baffled by the jury's decision to find Rack not guilty. Among young people, however, attitudes like Stowe's are not unusual. In increasing numbers, girls attending Boston public schools are being treated like sexual targets -- and when they report being groped, fondled, pinned down with their skirts lifted, or worse, their classmates too often accuse them of deserving such treatment. That's why sexual-violence educators and local police say they have begged the Boston public schools to educate students on how to recognize, prevent, and report offenses ranging from inappropriate teasing to rape. Yet at a time when other schools are adopting such programs, the critics complain, the Boston public-school system is not taking sex crimes seriously.

Reports of rape and sexual assault are still fairly rare in the schools, but the numbers are rising. In the 1996-'97 school year, 17 sexual assaults were reported, according to Lieutenant Mike Hennessy of the Boston School Police. In the 1997-'98 school year, there were 31 sexual assaults and one rape. And the first half of the 1998-'99 school year saw 21 sexual assaults and two rapes.

Moreover, national statistics have long shown that only a minority of sexual assaults are actually reported. One in five American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, according to the National Violence Against Women Survey released by the federal government last November, and more than half those women were assaulted before they turned 17. The silent victims are still the majority, according to the study. "Unfortunately, victims do not always come forward, whether it be to their teachers, their parents, or even their peers," explains Marcy Diamond, director of sexual-assault prevention and survivor services for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH).

In Boston, local rape crisis centers average more than 700 calls a year from teenagers claiming to have been sexually assaulted in school. Yet only five to ten cases of assault in the Boston public schools are prosecuted each year, says David Deakin, chief of the Suffolk County District Attorney's child-abuse unit. According to data gathered by the DPH, 7319 13- to 19-year-old girls statewide reported incidents of rape, attempted rape, and physical sexual assault between 1988 and 1998.

"We have seen an increase in [reports] of sexual assault in schools, but we are talking about rising from no cases to a few, which hardly reflects the actual number of assaults that occur," says Deakin. "That's why schools need to provide students with a curriculum that explains what is acceptable and what is not." Deakin believes that education will not only bring more victims forward -- girls who might have accepted such behavior in the past -- but also will send a clear message to harassers that their behavior will be punished.

The Newton public-school system has had such a curriculum in place since 1993. "When we began to examine the reasons for conflict in schools, gender disrespect topped the list," explains Nancy DiMella, health coordinator for the Newton schools. "We began to realize that at a very young age children often fail to discern between flirting, playing, and hurting."

With the assistance of Nan Stein, senior researcher and project director of the Bullying and Sexual Harassment in Schools project at Wellesley College's Center for Research on Women, DiMella created a sexual-harassment program for ninth graders at all Newton high schools. DiMella later adapted the work of Stein and others for use in all of Newton's 15 schools.

Programs such as the ones used in Newton are too new to evaluate rigorously, but principals have noticed kids beginning to discuss gender issues, says DiMella -- and parents are reporting a change in their kids' behavior.

"Even having to rely on anecdotal information, I have heard of many successes in schools across the country after including gender-disrespect courses in the curriculum," says Stein.

Stein, a former grade-school social-studies teacher, has been developing sexual-harassment curricula since 1979. Her work is geared toward students of all ages. With younger children, for example, Stein uses terms such as "bullying" and "good touch vs. bad touch" to teach both boys and girls that certain types of teasing and hurtful play, although common in the schoolyard, are not acceptable.

At the middle-school level, Stein uses role-playing, current events, and art projects to teach students how harassment and sexual violence are defined, what the consequences are, and how victims can get help from adults.

And in high school, lessons about dating violence, sexual assault, and other illegal behavior are reinforced. Stein's most recent work is "Gender Violence/Gender Justice," which she wrote with Dominic Cappello, a health educator. Published in March, the curriculum deals with gender violence, civil rights, gay-bashing, hazing, stalking, and restraining orders.

These age-specific lessons are key to the programs' success, advocates say. "One of the problems is that children are educating themselves on sexual behavior based on bits of information they get from peers, adults, and the media," explains Stein. "Children are little sponges. They hear and absorb everything. Unless someone interprets that information, they may perceive certain actions as acceptable."

"In many situations, these kids truly don't think what they are doing is wrong," agrees Mike Hennessy, the Boston School Police officer. "They think they are just teasing or fooling around. They need to be taught the difference between teasing and crossing the line before their behavior becomes more severe."

Last October, for instance, four boys between the ages of 12 and 14 tied a female classmate's backpack straps to the pole of a Green Line train and fondled the 13-year-old girl until she broke free and ran from the train. None of the adult commuters who witnessed the incident intervened.

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Stein's programs are being used not just in Newton but also in Brookline, Beverly, and Framingham. "Boston, however, has shown no interest," she says, even though she and her collaborators send out regular fliers and bulletins describing their work.

Officials at the police department, too, say that their recommendations to the Boston schools have fallen on deaf ears. Concerned that sexual assaults continue to increase in Boston despite the decrease in other types of crime over the past several years, the police department's sexual-assault unit is now working on a sexual-harassment/assault curriculum that is scheduled to be ready by the start of the next school year. A spokesman for Mayor Thomas Menino says that the schools are working with the police on that curriculum, but Boston schools superintendent Thomas Payzant says that he has not heard about it.

So far, one thing is for sure: no sexual-assault curriculum is in use citywide,

according to Gretchen O'Neil, a spokesperson for Payzant. Health classes that cover issues from sexually transmitted diseases to conflict resolution are required of all high-school students, Payzant says, but "there is not a single prescribed approach schools must take in covering particular issues."

"It may vary from school to school depending on what's happening at those particular schools," he says. "[Sexual assault] is an area that has to be included, but I worry about falling into the trap of demanding specific curricula for each of the dozen issues we have to deal with in the schools."

O'Neil says that lack of funding, resources, and time has kept the Boston school system from adopting a more comprehensive program. She adds that the schools have tried to work with the police, but to no avail: "We have tried to reach the police liaison for the school system to address the situation, but we haven't heard from her."

The police, however, say they are doing everything they can. "We've been trying to force-feed this stuff to the schools," says Sergeant Detective Margot Hill, spokesperson for the police. "[Police Commissioner Paul] Evans wants it taught. But they aren't biting."

Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught[a]phx.com.