This is the searing message of another survey that came spilling out of the school-house door last week. A school culture of sexual harassment exists in a wide and troubling social context, but change ultimately rests in the hands of the students themselves. After all, not all boys will be boys. Not all girls follow the leader. She thinks the role that everybody plays, the bystander, is pivotal.
Kids have to learn to speak out, to make moral judgments.
I tell them not to be moral spectators. Sexual harassment is, as Stein says, an older cousin to bullying. Students who understand the dividing line between teasing and bullying can learn the line between sexual play and harassment. They can draw that line. It may be one group of buddies who don't laugh at a joke.