It is not feminism it is liberalism's political correctness run amok.

Not, really.  What it is is that some people aren't willing to make any distinctions when they are afraid of making the wrong one.  There are clear, reasonable distinctions between what happened in this elementary school and what happened in the fast food restaurant EJ refers to.  But covering your ass, by definition, means sweeping all the outlying cases into the same net as the clear ones.

Besides, what are you going to do?  Do we go back to the 1970s on gender relations because we don't want to risk having some idiot principle do something goofy? 

No one knows the specifics.  Which of course means everyone will have an opinion as to how the school/parents/children should have handled the matter.  We can't know if the severity of the discipline is too much, too little or appropriate.  Many school districts have  learned the valuable lesson of not allowing situations like this to be ignored and in many cases overreact because of the real fear of lawsuits.  Some school districts will seize upon an incident like this to rid themselves of a child they consider a "problem" (and I'm not insinuating the child is or is not) because they don't have the patience of resources to handle the child.  The school is in the position of not being able to explain their reasoning behind the suspension because of the child's right to privacy. 

While we might not know the specifics, one thing we do know is that everyone will be riding this hobby horse for some time.

I think that's right.  Maybe we can surmise that, at a minimum, the school should watch the kid to make sure that he's okay, too.  But the real question - that I shot at but missed above, by a wide mark - is about the public reaction.  I don't see that incidents like these are at all informative on questions about feminism, political correctness and their assumed deleterious effects.  First, because we really don't know how deeply political correctness as a psychological motivation has penetrated society (where I sit, I'd say rather little).  Second, because in any case, overreactions don't necessarily implicate something wrong in what they are reactions to.  And third, as you say, because we don't know the facts, and these are really issues that involve kids, teachers, parents and none of the rest of us.

Depending on the degree of inappropriateness of the contact, the boy should have been suspended, regardless of whether it was sexual harassment or not.

Independent of sexual harassment, some behavior in our society is acceptable and some unacceptable.  In the end, we still have to teach children right from wrong.  

According to the article you link to, the exact events are disputed.  If one could determine what happened, it would then be reasonable to consider punishment. 

Consider yourself lucky that your 6 year old is female:

In 1996, a NYC second grader was suspended for kissing a second grader and ripping a button off her skirt -- an idea the boy said he got from his favorite book "Corduroy," about a bear with a missing button. Earlier that year, a Lexington, NC, 6-year-old was separated from his class after kissing a female classmate on the cheek

(From Boston Globe).

this is not feminism As a man that considers himself a feminist, I have to say sometimes you need to acknowlege the bad that can come along with the good.  We agree that this is zero tolerance run amuck, but the problem for feminism and other various *isms is that zero tolerance is a stupid stupid policy that feminists should run away from loudly and clearly. It is not some public school administrator gun-shy about being sued, or overreacting... it is the guaranteed result of zero tolerance policies. If we don't want to be associated with this incident, if you do not want femism to be associated with this incident, then we and you need to acknowlege the errors in zero tolerance and our participation in that process. Sadly, I find, that it is indeed feminism (and other various *isms)

Interesting dynamics in the debate. Conservatives are always calling for discipline and blaming misbehavior on liberals. But once someone names it sexual harrassment, it becomes a story instead about feminists running and ruining our lives or, god save us, PC liberals (whether you can name one or not) interfering with our schools. Being a more traditional woosy liberal, I tend to distrust the suspension, distrust bureaucratic responses, and agree with BevD that we're not in a position to get involved. But either way, the conservative outcry, even when parroted by a presumed liberal like DanG, is simply outrageous. 

It's not just about the power of labels either. There's a similar knee-jerk inanity whenever a conservative agenda is at stake. No one's considered abolishing laws against theft because an innocent man might be put on trial and vindicated, much less convicted. But all it takes is a silly law suit, even or especially one so silly that it loses, and the call to protect big business against regulation, malpractice, etc., etc., goes bonkers.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Sorry, nothing outrageous about it.  Your defense of the indefensible is just as kneej-erk as the Rightwingers you are complaining about.  These are six year olds.  It is people, I guess like you, who have cause principals like the one involved to punish a six year old boy.

What lawsuit?  The boy was punished by the school for sexual harrassment.  It seems to me that it is still stupid and that liberals insistence that everyone be turned into either victim or victimizer leads to these silly actions by government officials.

 
It fascinates me that self-righteous liberals are as dogmatic and un-reflective as any rightwinger.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I don't know, this article sounds pretty unimportant, not even scoring a 1 out of 10 on my outrageometer. That post sounds a little too AM radio for my taste. Borderline axe-grindy.

Like the sort of irrelevant fluff the MSM covers on "slow news days" ... like when the only other story is that Libby testified Cheney authorized him to leak classified info as part of a smear campaign in defense of a false premise for war.

And i have to say, considering the article didn't even mention feminism... pre-empting the nutjob editorials... ehh. I mean come on, pick your battles a bit better.

We all complain when the MSM runs the frivilous headline. And I understand a BLOG is much more stream of consciousness... but was that pre-emptive-feminism-tangential post really needed? I have to admit, I'm a little suprised when a contributor to TPMC is given a national platform to discuss anything, and something like that is chosen.

I join the rank of confused.  Is it a conservative, or patriarchal, position that boys should be allowed to reach inside girls' pants until they reach certain age?  (With an additional lifetime dispensation for the clergy??)

I surmise that there had to be some altercation otherwise no adult would notice a momentary gesture (if it was momentary).   Perhaps it would me more practical to slap the offending palm once or twice with a ruler (I guess a 6-year old cannot write 100 times "I will not ...")  but I have scant experience about good techniques for handling difficult children with even more difficult parents, so I would leave it to the school.  it is not like the boy was flayed or expelled.

Look at the way people take this report at face value.  It doesn't seem to occur to them that this might be a more involved issue than is being reported.  The only person who seems to have talked to anyone was the mother, and as it says in the article she wasn't available for an interview on wednesday, the day it was reported.  Now this will be reported ad nauseum as another school administration run amok with p.c. when the most startling fact of this story is that NO ONE KNOWS what happened.

Where do you count the Republicans/Conservatives that are constantly crying about the "liberal media?" Are they among the victimized or those trying to create victimizer/victimized dichotomies?

The plain fact that you're trying to set up liberals as the victimizers shows either your poor logic at best or your blatant hypocracy at worst.

"It is people, I guess like you, who have cause principals like the one involved to punish a six year old boy." Sorry, I'm losing any pretence of logic here. I said there isn't a liberal on the planet who'd defend treating the kid's action as sexual harrassment. So what exactly did "people like me" do to the principal, slip LSD into the school's water supply?

All I can imagine is that anyone who's ever considered the possibility of criminal behavior or discrimination against women is causing this. However, I said explicitly that it's an incorrect deduction and that, even in the wild and unlikely circumstance that it's behind the principal's reasoning, liberals would not be reponsible for that any more than laws against theft should be abolished if someone's coming to trial who's innocent. And not one word in DanG's post made an attempt to give reasons otherwise. I'm waiting.

Dan's also misquoting me as saying there's a suit involved, in order to ridicule my sloppy reasoning.  I never said that either. I said that the same bogus shift is used to justify tossing out legal defenses that are desperately needed in other cases. Can we get over the ad hominem attacks, or are those necessary in order to justify the belief at all? After all, it's not as if I said that people like Dan are preventing suits against hospitals killing innocent babies or whatever. I'm just demanding a sequential logic here.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

    From what I just saw on the 6:00 PM news here in Boston about 30 miles north of the area in question,  the school has begun to back off the sexual harassment position, with the possibility that they may have 'overreacted'. Oops, sorry. It was reported that the child will be reinstated, but transferred to another school.

    Watching my niece and nephew, in that age bracket, playing with their friends, it's easy to see how this could happen out of simple childish exhuberance, without a shred of 'harassment' involved. We've seen the mother of the 'offending child' being interviewed and that seems to be a likely possibility. What we don't have is any first hand information about the 'victim child' or her family. What have their dealings with the school been like through their child's/children's time there? The reading/viewing public doesn't have  enough information to draw any conclusions about this case other than make pro-con points about it.

    From personal experience with the school typical system, I can easily see the point that the administration was working overtime to cover their butts and make sure there was no room for a lawsuit against them by the complaining parent for failing to act.  I suspecct, from the latest reports, that they have been taking jagunda heat for this decision, and are looking for a way out.

Where are we now?  As regards to the issue at hand, a grade school boy copping a feel in a grade school girl, we're more in the realm of awkward adolesence, I think than in the realm of Anita Hill style harassment.

However, I'm an adult and, in the course of my adult job, just witnessed something that, in 2006, shocked me.  I'm a male journalist.  I'm collaborating on a story with a female journalist who is younger than me and who is working with me in order to learn about what I cover, but who is also highly capable and intelligent and who has taught me a thing or two during our collaboration.

 She and I went on an interview together, to talk to a guy who has filed a complicated financial lawsuit, the details of which are not important here.  She brought his 100 page complaint with her, and had earmarked portions that she had questions about.  During the interview, she pulled the complaint out of her bag and turned to her first dog-eared question.  She did it at just the right time, too, as her first question was completely germane to the conversation at the time.

He said, referring obviously to me with his body language:  "He made you read ALL of that?"

He never would have said that to me.  She showed great poise and acted like the comment didn't even phase her (though she told me later that it did).

It's 2006.  Our interview subject was a cultured and erudite gentleman.  He, I'm pretty sure, meant to convey nothing by his comment.

But he still made the comment.  I realized then that my female colleague, who practices the same profession as I do and in much the same way, still deals with issues that I don't.

Sure, this is just a story about a moment and maybe it says nothing about the world around us, but... I gather it's also more than that.  I feel like, despite the intgegration of women into the work force and despite advances made in dealingt with it, that I really saw that, in a moment where a man said something to my female colleague that he wouldn't dare say to me, that some very important and blatant old problems persist.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

From the linked piece: 

The Brockton School Committee defines sexual harassment among students, in part, as "uninvited physical contact such as touching, hugging, patting or pinching."

Apparently they have some handbook with various disciplinary problems laid out, and when they needed a label, they looked it up in the book and found whatever seemed applicable.  The definition seems more general than the common-sense notion. 

Assuming the allegations are correct, the boy should learn that he's not to do such things.  Whether the three-day suspension was excessive depends on exactly what happened and what is the customary way of dealing with such incidents.