California ramping up school-based sexual harassment education
It’s really not hard to understand, say school officials, advocates promoting harassment-free school environments, many parents and other interested parties.
Here’s the deal, in a nutshell: Much harmful and unlawful sexual conduct hat manifests itself in adulthood owes centrally to a perpetrator’s wrongful behaviors learned — and, importantly, not discouraged — years earlier.
As in the first schools of school. When puberty is reached. And especially commencing as children grow into adolescence in their middle-school years.
Abusive sexual behaviors — read assault and harassment — that are not identified and purposefully dealt with in the school environment in early years become the “training ground” for later aberrant sexual conduct that can lead to rape and other horrific outcomes, says one anti-harassment principal for a nonprofit advocacy group.
Many college-aged assaults “are symptoms of how children were socialized to be in relationships with other children,” adds another advocate.
California educators are clearly aware of the widespread problem and the need to do something about it. In fact, new state legislation taking effect from the 2016 autumn semester will require students from the 7th through the 12th grades to attend classes aimed at spotlighting troublesome behaviors leading to harmful sex-related outcomes and mitigating them.
That will be a challenge, say many program proponents, who nonetheless cite a dire need to work with potential abusers when they are young and can be more easily influenced and susceptible of behavior modification.
California’s initiative will doubtlessly be watched closely by educators across the country, given the troubling problems increasingly being noted on college campuses nationally.
“[W]e’ve done extraordinarily little to combat” [sexual assault and harassment] in schools, says one commentator.
The new soon-to-commence statewide educational initiative is an obvious effort to change that.
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