School Discipline Needs Better Responses to Sexual Assault
One goal that is sometimes raised in pursuing racial justice/equity is interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, which forces predominantly students of color out of schools and into prisons through suspensions, expulsions, and school presence of police as “school resources officers.” Under the rights-based approach to racial justice utilized since the civil rights era, advocacy has focused on protecting due process rights of accused, both in the criminal context to prevent mass incarceration as well as in the education context. Feminist advocates have simultaneously been focusing on the rights of survivors, especially in the education context.
There are many critiques of rights-based approaches generally, but I specifically have been thinking about the context of sexual assault. In racial justice and feminist circles alike, I think the disaggregation of interconnected issues regarding sexual assault tends to produce bad outcomes. Advocates concerned primarily with racial justice sometimes focus on an accused student’s procedural rights as the primary means of addressing the disproportionate educational discipline and subsequent mass incarceration of primarily boys and men of color. An important factor that’s missing from this approach, however, is the prevalence of rape and sexual assault. In general, 1 in 4 girls girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18, and teens between the ages of 16 and 19 are 3.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than the general public. Only 16% of rapes and 30% of sexual assaults are reported. Black women are almost twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as white women. Even more vulnerable to sexual assault are trans youth. In K-12 education, 78% of trans and gender nonconforming youth experience harassment and 12% experience sexual violence, with increased rates for trans and gender nonconforming students of color. This harassment leads to higher rates of students leaving school, and nearly half of those who do ultimately experience homelessness.
In focusing on the accused party’s procedural rights and the need to keep youth from being incarcerated by keeping them in schools, advocates ignore that a survivor’s education is also at stake. Students who experience sexual harassment suffer additional negative impacts that disrupt their education: students not wanting to attend school, skipping class, having difficulty studying, feeling physically ill, or even getting into trouble themselves. These effects compound social and environmental cues signaling to black girls that their education is not as important as their male peers’ educations, such as the over-punishment of black female youth and the racism and sexism of school dress codes. If the goal of racial justice is to keep black youth in schools, it must not ignore the education of black girls. Which is not to say, of course, that a student accused of committing sexual assault should be summarily expelled; the school-to-prison pipeline is a real problem, and nothing is accomplished by shunting kids out of school and into prison. Ultimately, schools have responsibilities to both students, and both students face the possibility of a disruption to their education as a result of schools’ disciplinary practices.
Women’s rights advocates, on the other hand, focus on the needs of survivors, and often call for harsher sentences to reflect the social outrage for sexual assault that historically has been and continues to be missing. While this focus is a result of familiarity with the prevalence of sexual violence and the importance of ensuring that survivors of sexual violence are not denied their education, it contributes to the ongoing disproportionate expulsion of youth of color and mass incarceration. This approach can be particularly damaging in the K-12 education setting, where youth are still developing their understanding of consent.
In order to effectively prevent rape and sexual assault, we need to begin dismantling rape culture and come to a common understanding about what consent means. These efforts can most effectively occur in schools, where young people are developing their understanding of how the world works. One critical component of this shift will be comprehensive sex education. In the absence of comprehensive sex education in schools, young people, particularly boys, are learning about sex and sexuality from mainstream media and pornography, which is particularly alarming as research has shown a correlation between pornography consumption and sexual violence.
In order to accomplish both these goals — to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and keep kids in school as well as stop perpetuating rape culture — we need to engage with both parties, accuser and accused. What could help this process would be a rule that excludes restorative justice or otherwise separating educational disciplinary measures from criminal proceedings. Schools could thereby retain jurisdiction over the accused and actually accomplish the goal of educating both parties on the role of consent while ensuring that the survivor is able to continue to access education as well as the accused. A rule expressly allowing schools to utilize restorative justice practices in the sexual assault context could also help, as some schools hesitate to engage in such practices for fear of liability.
While challenging, it is possible for schools to respond to sexual assault in such a way that ensure the survivor is able to feel safe and continue to obtain their education while also appropriately educating and disciplining a student who has sexually assaulted someone. We need to examine our approaches to these problems and envision something truly different in order to change the outcomes we have produced under our current model: disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color and the unrelenting threat of sexual violence.
