A new study shows that young boys who bully classmates in middle school can end up sexually harassing classmates in high school, and beyond. Specifically, the study looked at kids who use homophobic slurs.
What’s scarier is that many of these young people don’t recognize how bad this behavior is. Some kids described being groped, but then dismiss it saying the perpetrator was “just kidding.”
Some teachers were even dismissive about sexual harassment. One teacher said:
“Most of the sexual harassment training was viewed as a ‘human resource’ responsibility, aimed at adults in the workplace and not as a problem that students experience.”
There are ways we can help fix this situation. Some social and emotional learning, SEL, programs can help these teens and pre-teens learn important skills such as empathy and anger management and other relevant skills.
The rhetoric spread by our President-elect Donald Trump isn’t helping with the bullying, either. There were many cases of boys groping girls in the days after Trump won. Some kids were also scared of being deported. One student was told she was a bad person because her parents supported Trump.
One poor mother was stuck with the awkward task of explaining to her six-year-old daughter what the President-elect meant when he was talking about groping women. She stated:
“I told her we needed to talk about our bodies, and that sometimes bad people touch our bodies without permission.”
That is just not something her daughter should have to deal with. Hopefully, this can help reinforce the lesson that grabbing anyone’s private parts is absolutely wrong.
Catching these behaviors in young people will hopefully prevent them from doing these things as adults. Obviously, our p***y-grabbing President-elect didn’t get any of these programs at his school. We need to point out that these behaviors are never okay.
Here is a news clip about the issue:
Featured image by Bryan McDonald via Flickr/CC-By-SA-2.0
