Sexual bullying is not part of the growing up process

In March 2011 a 13-year-old girl in London, England, stood on a window ledge and begged a teenage boy to erase the cellphone video he possessed of her being sexually abused. He refused and she slipped, falling 20 metres to her death. An inquest this January ruled it an accident.

When I wrote “abused” there, I used it as a euphemism for two coerced sex acts. To be mercifully brief, one boy demanded that the girl perform one upon him after a party, and the next day another boy demanded that she do the same to him, or he’d smash her windows. Unbeknownst to the girl at the time, a video was made of her second compliance and then sent around to the cellphones of her schoolmates. She found out four hours before she died.

This is far from being the first story in Britain about the phenomenon of children and teenagers using each other sexually and then circulating the evidence via cellphones. British police recently used the media to get across the message that child pornography on cellphones is still illegal when possessed by children. One typical underage scenario is of a boy promising to become a girl’s boyfriend if she sends him a photo of herself naked. The girl complies and then the boy sends the photo around to his pals. How sad that some girls will do just about anything to get that ultimate playground status symbol, “a boyfriend.”

There has been such a spate of stories in the British press recently about underage girls succumbing to pressure to supply such photos or to perform sexual acts on male peers that I have been straining to understand why so many pre-teen and teenage girls just give in. I have also wondered why they are so reluctant to tell their parents what is going on. But then I remembered what it was like to be a 14-year-old girl myself.

I witnessed so much sexual bullying in my own elementary school playground that at last I gathered up all my courage and made an appointment to speak to the principal about it.

I cried as I explained what had been going on. The principal gestured to the tissue box on his desk. And I have never forgotten his immortal words: “Boys will be boys” and “It’s all part of growing up.” No wonder I never told my parents.

When I was in elementary school, bigger boys beat up on smaller boys, and boys shoved their hands down girls’ pants or up their shirts with such frequency and so little reaction from the apparently oblivious teachers that I thought it was legally permissible behaviour. So convinced was I that only graduation from elementary school afforded children the protection of the law from each other that when I spied the worst of my classroom bullies shortly after we had gone our separate ways to Grade 9, I taunted him with, “You can’t touch me now, ’cause we’re in high school.”

I think my confidence shook his, for he dropped his fist.

Not only are 14-year-old girls not necessarily well-versed in the law, their attitudes are not necessarily morally developed, either. After I left the principal’s office, red-eyed and conspicuous, I confided in two other girls what I had said. They were confused and censorious.
This was in the 1980s, when kids used computers to play Space Invaders, so although I have no doubt that the sexual violence to be found in video games and on the Internet is a serious problem for children and teens today, they are not entirely to blame for children’s coercive or compliant sexual behaviour. Porn and camera phones have just upped the evil ante. What parents and teachers have to understand is that children and teens need protection not only from evil, charismatic adults but from each other.

Not all — indeed, perhaps very few — girls under 16 have the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to resist and discourage sexual bullying by their peers. It is the responsibility of parents, schools and churches to find out where it is happening and to stop it. Sexual bullying should not be “all part of growing up.”

(Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer and author of Seraphic Singles.)