Educators Get a Lesson in Sexual Harassment

LAKE FOREST —  The taunting traced back to an incident at a birthday party. One day in January, a 10-year-old girl had gotten her head stuck inside a dollhouse while playing with friends.

Later at school, a complaint alleges, a classmate seized on the mishap to fabricate a tale that the girl actually had simulated a sexual act with a Ken doll. The innuendo allegedly spread and intensified in the ensuing months.

The girl, according to the complaint, was subjected to “sexually lewd comments and gestures, vulgarity and insults . . . in class, in the hallways, at lunch, and on the playground.”

The alleged abuse “escalated on a daily basis.” She was ostracized by classmates and began seeing a counselor.

Ordinarily, this story of a schoolgirl’s torment would have ended at the principal’s office. Instead, it was typed out as a legal complaint and filed this month in Orange County Superior Court.

The lawsuit against a boy, his family, a Lake Forest elementary school principal and Saddleback Valley Unified School District comes as allegations of “peer sexual harassment” are gaining wider public attention.

The term, still in flux, generally encompasses unwelcome, repeated, sexually charged acts by students against students, including teasing, taunting or touching.

In recent years, educators have faced a series of high-profile accusations that they allowed such behavior to occur.

A year ago, a Petaluma school system settled one student’s sexual harassment lawsuit for $250,000 without admitting wrongdoing. The girl alleged that she suffered lewd taunts about hot dogs and other abuse in junior high school and was forced to leave town. The school district in Antioch, another Northern California city, was found liable in 1996 for $500,000 resulting from a girl’s claim that she endured sexual comments and threats in sixth grade.

But a federal jury in New York recently rejected a widely publicized sexual harassment suit by a student who said that boys had called her names in sixth grade and that she and other girls had been physically abused.

And a suit filed in November 1995 against Capistrano Unified School District, in which a 13-year-old girl alleged that 11 other girls sexually harassed and assaulted her, was settled without trial in February. A district lawyer said school officials were “happy” with the undisclosed terms.

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There are no statistics on the number of peer harassment lawsuits nationwide. Some date an upsurge in such litigation to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas debate of 1991.

Merrick Rossein, a law professor at City University of New York who represented the New York girl, said the number of peer harassment cases is increasing exponentially. Those who defend schools say that may be an exaggeration but concede the fear of lawsuits is widespread.

As they grapple with the emerging legal threat, few educators shrug off incidents anymore with the adages “boys will be boys” or “girls will be girls.” (Female students also have been implicated in lawsuits.)

But get-tough policies can be problematic too. In September 1996, a North Carolina school district caused a national uproar by suspending 6-year-old Johnathan Prevette for sexual harassment. His offense was kissing a girl on the cheek.

Heeding calls for help from educators, the federal government published new guidelines in March on how to deal with complaints.

The Department of Education said in its analysis that the 25-year-old federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools and is perhaps best known for spurring gender equity in athletic programs, also prohibits sexual harassment in schools. But that question has not been settled definitively by the courts.

In California, a state law in force since 1993 has prohibited sexual harassment of students, allowing districts to expel students as early as fourth grade for that offense.

Many educators contend the formal legal charge of sexual harassment is often the wrong way to handle incidents that arise when schoolchildren confront their developing sexuality and each other on the playground. Schools, they say, should not always be held to the same standard as the workplace.

“The problem with these suits for damages, if it continues and if it becomes the law of the land, is that you have a potential for liability for acts over which you have no control,” said Gwendolyn Gregory, deputy general counsel for the National School Boards Assn. “That’s the concern. Unlike an employee, there’s only so much punishment that you can mete out for kids.

“It’s not just the schools’ problem,” she added. “We’re the ones getting sued, but the entire society has to deal with it.”

But Yolanda Wu, a staff attorney for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represented the Petaluma plaintiff, said the comparison to sexual harassment rules in the workplace is on point.

“In fact, you could argue that schools have a higher responsibility to do something about harassment between kids,” Wu said. “Kids are more vulnerable than employees are. Also, we’ve been trying to point out to courts that schools are the training ground for the workplace. You teach the boys before they grow up to become men and do the same thing.”

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The full story of what happened to the girl at the Lake Forest school could remain unclear as the lawsuit wends through the legal system. Many details would be kept private if the suit is settled with a confidentiality agreement.

The parents of the boy named as a defendant could not be reached. The principal did not respond last week to requests for comment. The district superintendent, Peter A. Hartman, referred questions to a district spokeswoman.

While she would not comment on the lawsuit, spokeswoman Elaine Carter noted that Saddleback Valley Unified has a long-standing policy against sexual harassment of students. She also said that the district reviewed an initial claim describing the girl’s allegations, before the lawsuit was filed, and that it was “appropriately resolved.”

The mother of the plaintiff vehemently disagreed, saying that her repeated attempts to seek help from the school principal were fruitless.

“I don’t feel they made any effort. I really don’t. In the five months I kept going back and forth to the principal, it only got worse,” the mother said. She alleged that the principal said her daughter “was making it up, more or less.”

Invented or not, the girl’s story in the lawsuit contains strong sexual language for a fifth-grade environment.

The complaint alleges that the girl was “subjected to the humiliation of being called ‘molester,’ ‘rapist,’ ‘child rapist’ [and] ‘lesbian,’ and was taunted with accusations of ‘doing sick, nasty things with other girls.’ ”

The suit also alleges that the girl and two friends reported the taunting to the principal soon after it began, but that the principal’s efforts to mediate only triggered more abuse from classmates.

The girl, the suit said, “has been so traumatized by the conduct that she is frequently physically ill [and] does not want to go to school.”

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Despite the trauma, her mother said, the girl is prepared to talk to authorities to back up her story. The family’s suit seeks unspecified damages for emotional distress and costs such as medical expenses.

“We didn’t want to even bother with the lawsuit if she did not want to talk,” the mother said. “As scared as she is of speaking in public, she seems to think if it came to that, she would answer questions as best she could.”

Gregory Bergman, a Los Angeles attorney who helped negotiate the Capistrano Unified settlement, said educators have redoubled efforts to respond to sexual harassment complaints.

“Schools as a whole are paying more attention to this issue,” he said, “and not figuring ‘kids will be kids.’ Schools have been dealing with it in a more direct, timely manner.”