Hello. My name is Linda Purrington. With Louise Brawdy, I formed Parents
for Title IX,and recently I started Title IX Advocates to reach out to a
wider segment of the public. We seek to educate people about Title and
gender equity issues that affect the schools.
I was interested in the comment by Eleanor Linn that adults in schools
are often bystanders in the spectacle of sexual harassment. In all of
our cases, we are struck by the same thing: that adults who are in the
position of modeling appropriate behavior for the next generation are in
the position of seeing and ignoring or hiding and trivializing the more
or less constant and ubiquitous sexual harassment of both sexes--with
girls and women much worse harassed and less able to fight back--by boys
and men.
The AAUW report noted two important aspects of this behavior by school
adults: (1) 18 percent of the harassment reported was done by adults
themselves, setting up a powerful role model for peer harassment; and
(2) all the peer harassment was done in public places--that is, in areas
supervised by adults and open to public eyes. So we must require school
adults to cease sexual harassment and we must require them further to
begin seeing and controlling the public harassment they are now ignoring
clearly as a matter of policy.
These two steps are a prerequisite to halting the huge amount of peer
sexual harassment in the schools. It is crucial for our ability to
function as a democracy that we stop this massive harassment in the
schools, before it graduates into our adult citizenry--graduates to more
serious crimes such as rape, domestic violence, and murder.
Please speak to these points in addressing the upcoming Supreme Court
ruling on peer harassment in Davis v. Monroe County.
Thank you,
Linda Purrington
TitleIX Advocates
lpurring@earthlink.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Apr 12 2002 - 15:14:10 EDT