A school's responsibility
What do you call a situation in which an adult takes aside a 13-year girl and instructs her not to tell her own mother about the sexual assault she has just endured?
Depends on who has committed the assault. The scenario just described most often plays out with one additional detail: The adult is the assailant, and the demand for silence is just one more contemptible facet of the crime.
In the case of the 13-year-old Curran Middle School girl who was allegedly victimized, the purported assailant was a classmate -- a 14-year-old boy. But Curran administrators added a final dollop of indignity, telling the girl to keep quiet about the incident. The girl's family only learned of the incident three months after the fact, after the mother became concerned about the girl's behavior.
Astounding -- and in a sense more reprehensible than the original breach of decency.
If the details of the sordid incident are correct -- and Bakersfield City School District officials are not denying it -- Curran officials not only sabotaged this family's opportunity to help their own daughter understand what happened and begin a supervised process of healing, they conveyed a harmful message to both the girl and the perpetrator. To her: Get over it; this is not that big a deal. To him: What's a little "feel," other than a rite of youth we don't like to talk about? And to school employees who knew about the incident months before the dam broke: Concern for our respective hides preempts concern for the children we supervise.
Public schools -- all schools -- don't merely have a responsibility to educate. They're responsible for the welfare and safety of our children during the hours we entrust them to their care. The BCSD needs to get its house in order -- quickly.
