So they decided to keep track of his behaviour as they noticed how awkward and upset he made the girls in their class.
“Sometimes they’d laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly,” the boy recalled. “Even the ones that said he was ‘creepy’ laughed, because they were obviously not trying to tick him off or anything. So they’re just fake laughing, awkwardly laughing.”
Reading the story and the Twitter thread I found it on, I was struck by three things. The first two things are depressing, but the third one gives me hope. To start with that latter one, that it was the boys in who noticed this behaviour and then tried to do something about it, that’s exactly the way you want your boys to behave. Not just noticing sexual harassment, not just being uncomfortable with it, but to try and step in and stop it. Their parents should be incredibly proud they raised their sons right. The assumption with this has always been that boys neither noticed nor cared when this happened and these kids just put the lie to it.
Which helps take the sting out the more depressing facts that it still took decades before this particular sex pest was handled. Decades of parents, teachers and other authority figures not listening to the kids in their care, allowing him and who knows how many others to get away with their molesting. Worse, that this wasn’t an unique situation by any stretch of the imagination. Look at the Twitter thread and you see multiple examples of people bringing up their own experiences with handsy teachers and other pedos. Not just coming from American posters, but from all over the world. Certainly I immediately remembered the chemistry teacher who was a bit too eager to teach the girls ‘hands on’. This is the reality of pedophilia, of child molesting. Not so much strangers in white vans as the respected high school coach next door getting away with it because nobody believes or cares what children go through.
Seeing so many adults have these awful memories from their own childhood, you’d think they’re ready to believe their own children, but this still seems rare. And when it’s poor children, or children of colour, children who already don’t really count, then it becomes almost impossible to get anybody to care. We’ve seen that with the whole “Muslim grooming gangs” panic in the UK, where wghen you dug down, the real issue wasn’t “Asian gangs recruiting white girls as sex workers”, but more the police and other authorities just didn’t care about what happened to poor girls from council estates, were insulted that they had to care, thought it was their own fault in the first place and then latched on to “political correctness made it impossible to do our work” as an excuse for their inaction.
Luckily these boys did care. While they learned they couldn’t trust the authorities, they also learned solidarity. That if nobody cares to keep you safe, you have to rely on each other to keep yourselves safe.
