Nick Martinez, at Southwest Middle School, in Florida, received an in-school suspension, accompanied by the hoary announcement: This will go down on your permanent record.
Fourteen year-old Nick's bad behavior was this: He hugged his best friend, in the school hallway. Unfortunately for them, the principal saw and since contravened to the school's well-known, zero-tolerance policy barring hugging and hand-holding, Nick and the girl were sent to the dean's office and there received their punishment.
Nick's friend didn't try to rebuff his advances. In fact, the hug was mutual. This wasn't sexual harassment, not by the wildest stretch of imagination, but that doesn't matter at Southwest. The rule is clear and is uniformly and unambiguously enforced.
The school's approach is exasperating. While it has the virtue of not showing favoritism and opening up the doors of arbitrary and inconsistent enforcement, it errs on the side of being simplistic and rigid to the point of being absurd.
But there is a genuine reason why schools need to be concerned about unwanted advancements. A report issued this week by the American Association of University Women finds that nearly half of the 7-12 grade the students claim to have been subject to sexual harassment at school during the previous year. Thirteen percent of the girls said that they were victims of uninvited and unwanted touching and more than three percent said they were forced into a sexual act.
Southwest's policy is ostensibly to protect the children who are in their in their care for the day. But it is a long way from two friends hugging to what officials at Penn State must have seen as not very important, sodomizing a young boy in a shower.
While unwanted sexual advances are intolerable, banning all touching amongst children teaches a lesson that may be just as bad. People need to be touched, both figuratively and literally. We know from the 1950s Harry Harlow experiments with baby monkeys deprived of touching. Further explorations in the psychology of attachments have underscored how important skin-to-skin contact is.
Who would rather spend their last days on Earth with a machine, deprived of human touch?
While Southwest's reasons for their policy may be good, unfortunately the message that they are sending is harmful to human relations. Children need to learn how to touch tenderly and with care, to know the difference between that and harmful blows.
I knew a man who wouldn't let his grandchild sit on his lap because he was afraid of being thought of as a child molester. Maybe he had good reason to doubt himself. I don't know. But what I do know is that the child was poorer for not being wrapped in his grandfather's loving arms or having his hair stroked.
Southwest has taken the easy way out. It assiduously adheres to a rule. This requires no thought. And that is another very poor lesson for a school to convey to its students.
