What happens when schools are silent about sex crimes?

The allegation and subsequent arrest stunned the school, and the administration all but froze. The alleged perpetrator was suspended indefinitely, but officials, wary of further entangling the school in a criminal case, instructed faculty and staff not to talk with students about the alleged rape. The school itself issued little public comment.

This kind of silence is all too common. When schools are forced to deal with sex crimes, the official response frequently is to shut down communications -- refuse to address the issue on campus, defer to the legal system, decline public comment. As in the Belmont case, administrators often cite legal reasons for their silence, explaining that any reaction by school staff could interfere with the court case, leaving the school open to liability. And if the alleged incident takes place off campus, school officials may opt to ignore it altogether.

"Paralysis is a good word," says Suzanne Morrison, a graduate student at the Boston University School of Public Health, who recently helped develop a television public service announcement on teenage dating violence. "Schools know what they should be doing, but they don't know how to do it."

Indeed, a school that remains silent in the wake of a sexual allegation usually makes a bad situation even worse. All sex crimes are traumatic, confusing, and complicated, but they are even more so for adolescents. Not talking about these events or accusations can lead to hurtful behavior, and worse. Belmont students circulated a petition for the return of the accused rapist right in the same corridors where the alleged victim walked. On Martha's Vineyard, two student rape cases in five years -- one resulting in a conviction, another in an acquittal -- have divided a close-knit island community. In Mattapoissett, school officials remain under fire for reportedly failing to notify police about charges of sexual misconduct by a teacher -- a mistake that, if true, appears grievous since the teacher, John Shockro, pleaded guilty last December to raping two students.

To be sure, not every school chooses to ignore sex-crime allegations. But many people who specialize in sexual-violence counseling think that too many Massachusetts schools choose a strategy of enforced silence.

"It's better than it was a couple of years ago," says counselor Carol Sousa, who cowrote the state's official guidelines for addressing teen dating violence in schools. "But the majority of schools out there are unprepared."

Belmont is a sleepy town, a suburb some four miles northwest of Boston. Its residents are predominantly white and mostly affluent. On a recent afternoon, kids in soccer uniforms and shinpads ramble freely around the center of town, which is home to a Gap, a Starbucks, and a Filene's department store; many of the cars parked outside are shiny and new.

For the most part, Belmont is a place to escape. And for the past several months, many people in this community of 27,000 have wanted to escape the ugliness of February's alleged rape. The local newspaper, the Belmont Citizen-Herald, has been excoriated simply for covering the incident -- in particular, for naming the alleged perpetrator. For some Belmontians, the mix of sexual and racial tensions involved in the case has become too messy to handle.

At a time when schools are increasingly called upon to address a range of social issues -- violence, drugs, and sex, for starters -- this reaction is not surprising. On the whole, educators have become much better at responding to crisis: today, if a student commits suicide, or is killed in an automobile accident, it's not uncommon for counselors to be waiting for the yellow buses when school begins the following day.

When the crisis involves accusations of sexual assault, however, it's another matter. Not only are school officials nervous about the legal implications of getting involved, but sex itself -- even apart from issues of harassment or violence -- continues to be a difficult subject for many educators and parents. Denial plays a role, too. School officials and other members of the community often have trouble believing that such a crime could take place in their town.

"Some schools don't recognize the scope of the problem, and might not feel they need to have [training], but they should," says Ellen Connorton, coordinator of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Violence and Intentional Injury Prevention Program.

Yet no school is immune from sexual violence. Virtually every institution, from the toughest public school to the toniest preparatory academy, must at some point confront an incident of a sexual nature that involves students or staff. Sexual-assault controversies have hit Buckingham Browne & Nichols in Cambridge, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and St. Mark's in Southborough. At Dorchester High School, a 17-year-old student was recently indicted for raping a female classmate in a school bathroom. Earlier this week, two teenagers from Worcester were charged with raping a girl at Boston College High School during a weekend basketball tournament.

So far, most Massachusetts school districts do not have specific in-school policies and programs designed to address teen dating violence and other sex crimes. The state has created a comprehensive program to educate staff and students, but currently, just 52 of the state's 300-plus school districts are enrolled.

A school that fails to address such issues courts serious trouble, counselors say. If students aren't able to talk comfortably about sexual violence in a school environment, it can lead to confusion and rumormongering.

But some schools still feel it's safer to keep quiet. In Belmont, despite the complaints of students, administrators continue to have very little to say -- inside or outside school -- about the alleged rape. Neither Belmont High principal Foster Wright nor schools superintendent Peter Holland responded to requests for an interview.

Somehow, Megan Cryer finished her four years at Martha's Vineyard Regional High School in impressive academic standing. Despite the trauma of being date-raped as a sophomore -- Cryer's assailant, a popular football star, pled guilty to statutory rape charges and received a suspended sentence -- the straight-A student was the second-ranked member of the class of 1995.

As class salutatorian, Cryer was asked to deliver a welcoming speech at the school's graduation ceremonies. Though the senior had never publicly discussed the rape incident, she decided to do so at graduation. By then, Cryer had endured nearly three years of taunts and stares from fellow students. The school administration had been timid about addressing her case. She felt she had earned the right to talk about it, and that the speech would provide closure.

But school officials disagreed. When Cryer notified the school of her intention to speak about the rape, staff urged her to omit the word rape and refer to the incident instead as a "terrible thing." They felt rape was an inappropriate topic for a welcoming speech.

Offended, Cryer declined to speak at all. And her graduation-day protest -- announced in a page one Globe story and covered by television and news organizations around the country -- became a major embarrassment to Vineyard high-school administrators, who were condemned coast-to-coast for silencing the student. Cryer herself was praised nationally for her courage in standing up to school leaders.

The celebrated case of Megan Cryer also reinforced a central point: when school officials attempt to duck the issue of sexual violence, they usually create much more trouble than they avoid.

"You can never make a sexual assault a pleasant situation -- it's an incredibly painful and difficult issue to deal with, and in some ways, there is never any closure," says Ann Wallace, a women's support counselor on the Vineyard. "But by not talking about it, by not being open about it, you polarize the situation, because you let every person, on his or her own, become judge and jury."

One result of this inaction, Wallace says, is that sex-crime victims who return to school can find themselves revictimized by their peers. Adolescents, much like adults, tend to deride sex-crime victims by calling them promiscuous -- rationalizing that the victim could have avoided trouble by taking some easy precautions. Wallace recalls a time when she met with a group of female high-school students shortly after a rape allegation was made. She thought the girls might empathize with their classmate, but she was wrong.

"They tore her apart," Wallace says. "They found every fault they possibly could about the victim, and nailed her."

Counselors say that this victim-bashing is a way for people to put emotional distance between themselves and the crime. To acknowledge that someone could not have prevented a rape, on the other hand, is to acknowledge that it could happen to anyone.

"At their age, teens are still feeling invulnerable" and will go to great lengths to preserve that feeling, says Naomi Freedner, coordinator of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's teen dating violence project. "In order to make sense of an event like [a rape], they'll point out all the ways someone could potentially have been deserving, or brought it upon themselves." Adds Wallace: "The victim is put in a really difficult position. Either she is seen as a liar, or she is seen as ruining a boy's life."

And victims suffer further when school leaders decline to discuss a sexual assault allegation, and instruct faculty and staff to do the same. Schools may meet with alleged victims or perpetrators and their families in private, but if officials say little in public, their silence can be interpreted as unsupportive. "When a school is quiet, it makes the victim feel even worse," says Doreen Gallagher, the program coordinator for the Dating Violence Intervention Program, a Cambridge-based school outreach project. "They already feel they have experienced a crime. But when they get to school, and the school isn't talking about it, they feel they have done something wrong."

Furthermore, a school that doesn't address sexual violence risks creating an unsafe, chaotic environment for the student population at large. Last month at the Vineyard high school, after a senior student-athlete was acquitted of a rape charge, more than a dozen boys wore T-shirts to class reading NEVER LIE RAPE. Clearly, students are entitled to express their opinion; these young men were making a statement about a friend they believed had been unfairly accused. But what message does their statement send to their classmates, especially the young women? And if the school had previously offered sensitivity training to these students, would they still have worn the shirts?

"If a school is not taking a proactive approach about sexual violence, then they are making a statement that this type of behavior is okay," says Katherine Rocco, a BU graduate student who worked with Suzanne Morrison on the public service announcement about teen dating violence. "It's much better to teach than to blame."

And it's not just students who need the teaching. Carol Sousa, the author of the state's dating violence guidelines, remembers one rape case where the school's vice principal wrote a letter to the court in support of the alleged perpetrator. She also recalls being present at a private meeting at another school between school leaders and an alleged rape victim; after the girl explained her version of events, the administrator leaned over and denounced her charges as "bullshit."

Sousa laughs, disgusted. "The head of the school . . . saying all of this is bullshit," she says.

Administrators respond that when sexual allegations are made against students or staffers, schools are placed in an unenviable, and often impossible, position. For starters, the legal process must be respected -- for example, if students are material or character witnesses in a court proceeding, school staff must be careful not to influence their testimony. The alleged victim must be treated sensitively, and the alleged perpetrator must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

At the same time, however, school leaders are faced with a community demanding action and answers. Students want to know what happened. Parents want to know whether a school is safe. The media, too, can be clamoring for comment. For school leaders, the hurricane of privacy issues and ambiguities surrounding a juvenile sex crime can quickly become overwhelming.

But there are ways that schools can publicly address sex crimes -- and answer confusing questions -- while preserving the integrity of a criminal case. More important, there are steps that schools can take to shape student and staff attitudes about sexual harassment. They can change the culture that tolerates sexual violence.

"If the issue is being talked about among students, there should be a sense of responsibility among schools to turn that conversation into something constructive," says Marianne Winters, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault. "I think it helps create a safer community where these things can be dealt with."

First, however, schools need to have a clear understanding about what they are and are not permitted to do in the wake of a sex-crime allegation. Quite often, administrators think that if a criminal investigation is under way, their hands are tied. Gregory Scotten, the Vineyard high school's principal, says that when he first learned of the Megan Cryer case, prosecutors told the school to stay out of the matter completely. Scotten followed those instructions to the letter, which he now regrets.

"We were told that the school couldn't have anything to do with the case," Scotten says. "But without the ability to have an open communication and dialogue, it caused more trouble than was necessary."

Indeed, talking almost always helps more than it hurts. Essex County district attorney Kevin Burke, who has prosecuted a number of school-related sex crimes, says that he encourages schools to address sexual violence in the wake of an incident; it's a way of releasing pressure in the student body and responding to community concerns, he says.

"You can discuss the issue of sexual assault, so long as you don't talk about the facts and events of the case in any detail. Students can discuss their feelings related to the case. In fact, we all need to talk about it," Burke says.

But counselors aren't satisfied with this reactive approach; schools are now being asked to educate staff and establish sexual-violence policies long before an incident ever occurs. Most counselors favor a comprehensive, interdisciplinary sensitivity-training program that lasts throughout the year; these days, abbreviated workshops and traveling road shows are considered mostly ineffective.

"The kind of global goal is to create a climate of zero tolerance," says Naomi Freedner, the state's teen dating violence coordinator. "And that's not going to happen if the ninth-grade class does one unit on teen dating violence and sexual abuse. It might raise awareness, but it's not enough."

Nan Stein, a senior researcher at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and an acclaimed specialist on adolescent gender violence, is developing a curriculum that integrates dating violence education for teens into an interdisciplinary format. For instance, Stein says, students may discuss sexual-violence issues in English class when they read Shakespeare or Jane Austen. "I'm trying to go in the front door by attaching themes of rape and domestic violence to literature that kids are already learning," Stein says.

The current state program, run through the Department of Public Health, recommends a three-pronged approach. The first component is education: schools follow a specific curriculum to raise awareness among educators, students, and parents. The second part is response: if a sex crime occurs, schools are expected to provide support groups for victims and intervention for perpetrators. The last part is the development of an official school policy to handle sexual harassment and abuse.

These steps, counselors say, help bring clarity to the confusing and emotional situations that often surround sex crimes. For example, what should a school do if one student takes out a restraining order against another? A policy can sort out that scenario before it occurs. (Most schools opt to design a schedule whereby the two students do not share classroom space; some even designate specific corridors and stairwells for each student to use.)

Perhaps the most delicate aspect of the state's program is intervention. School officials, sometimes working with social-service workers and law enforcement, try to identify students who are deemed to be at high risk for committing sexual violence, as well as students who have already been accused or convicted of a crime. These students, who are almost always male, are placed in support programs designed to address their problems.

Such programs will undoubtedly make some people uncomfortable. But counselors insist that perpetrator counseling groups are invaluable, because they give the school a forum in which to address the early warning signs of potential sexual violence. (Several counselors interviewed for this story point to the Jonesboro, Arkansas, school killings as an example of dating violence that could have been identified and prevented -- one of the assailants was allegedly motivated by a female student who spurned his advances.)

"We cannot deny or avoid the fact that there is a problem with male violence in this culture," says Jeff O'Brien, who directs the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University's Center for Sport in Society.

In addition to helping perpetrators and victims, O'Brien contends, it's essential to change the attitude of the entire school toward sexual violence. The MVP program, he says, challenges young people not to be bystanders to sex crimes -- or to any kind of sexual harassment.

"By a bystander, we don't necessarily mean that they are witnessing an act," O'Brien says. "We mean they are allowing [crimes] to happen because they aren't being proactive about it."

It will be many months, if not years, before Belmont High School puts its rape controversy to rest. The case has yet to go to trial, and if it does, the courtroom drama will likely be painful for the entire community. Already, the suburb is overstressed by the allegations and countercharges surrounding the case. "At first, it was a hot topic," says the mother of one high-school student. "But now everyone wishes it would just go away."

That's an unlikely scenario, though. It's also unlikely that the high school -- which, at last report, had taken some steps to address dating violence, including bringing a drama program dealing with sexual violence to the school -- will ever fully be able to make up for its early inaction. When the student body needed guidance, school officials weren't there. And the scars left behind aren't easily repaired.

"Schools are being asked to do a lot these days. They aren't just places where you learn history and math, and we appreciate that," says Jeff O'Brien. "But until we realize how bad this problem is -- and until people who are in the position to do something about it realize it -- the situation isn't going to get any better."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.